April 25th, 2008 is a day that I’ll never forget. It was the worst day of my life and that’s no doubt why the details are so vividly etched into my mind... What I’m going to share with you is the most personal story I’ve ever shared. But I'm sharing because I think it’s an incredibly important lesson that literally everyone can benefit and learn from.…Read More

April 25th, 2008 is a day that I’ll never forget. It was the worst day of my life and that’s no doubt why the details are so vividly etched into my mind… What I’m going to share with you is the most personal story I’ve ever shared. But I’m sharing because I think it’s an incredibly important lesson that literally everyone can benefit and learn from.
By the time you get to the end of my story, I promise you’ll have a whole new appreciation for just how important conditioning really is — and how to develop it in yourself (or in your clients) not just to perform better, but to live better.

Getting the Call

I remember stepping outside of my gym to get the mail at around 12:30pm when I got the call. It was from an area code that I didn’t recognize and I wouldn’t have normally answered it, but this time I did for some reason.

“Is this Joel Jamieson?” the voice asked.

“Yes, who is this?” I cautiously replied.

“My name is Jennifer and I’m a nurse from the intensive care unit at Doctor’s Hospital in Miami, and I’m calling to let you know that your mom is with us and she’s had a stroke.”

Anyone that’s ever gotten a call like this will tell you that it can literally take your breath away. The shock and confusion are almost too much and the words you just heard just don’t make sense.

I had just talked to my mom the night before and nothing was wrong. In general, she seemed healthy: she didn’t have any pre-existing medical conditions, she wasn’t on any medications, she wasn’t overweight, she didn’t drink, and she didn’t smoke.

Of course like the majority of people, she didn’t work out — and her diet definitely could have been better. But she was a flight attendant and was very active, routinely walking all over the place during her layovers. She was on one of those layovers in Miami when she had the stroke.

At the time, I would have been less surprised if I had gotten a call about her plane crashing – something that’s about as statistically unlikely as it gets – than about her having a stroke.

The 12 Most Brutal Hours of My Life — And a Chance To Find Answers

Within a couple of hours of getting that call, I was at the airport and boarding a plane from Seattle to Miami. It was bad enough to answer that call, but to make matters worse, the nurse couldn’t give me any details about the stroke severity or what to expect. All I knew was that my mom was in the ICU and unconscious.

I had no idea what to think and no way to know just how bad it was…or if she was even going to survive. There was nothing I could do but spend the next 12 hours, between the flights and layover, wondering just how bad it was.

I didn’t know how the hell I was going to deal with it if she didn’t make it, or if she did make it, but couldn’t walk, talk or remember anything.

Those were by far the most brutal 12 hours of my life.

I finally got to the hospital at around 8am, running on literally zero sleep. I was mostly relieved to learn that my mom had at least regained consciousness and the doctors said the odds were good that she’d survive. However, there were no guarantees. The next 48-72 hours were critical and my mom needed to remain in the ICU.

I lived in the 200 sq ft. ICU room for 3 days, running on little-to-no sleep. I spent most of my time staring at a variety of screens monitor everything from my mom’s blood pressure to body temperature. Every few hours or so, an alarm on one of them would start going off, which would bring a nurse or doctor into the room to check on everything and reset the alarm.

They kept assuring me this was perfectly normal, but watching my mom go in and out of consciousness as she was pumped full of various medications felt like anything but “normal” to me.

When my mom was awake, she was able to talk a little bit, though it was clear that the right side of her body and face were paralyzed. The paralysis and her drug-induced state did little to reassure me that everything was going to eventually be ok again.

When “Statistics”Become Personal — Also, How Does a Healthy Person Have a Stroke?

After 3 agonizing days in the ICU, my mom was eventually transferred to a standard hospital room where she stayed for another 7 days. From there, she transitioned to a rehab facility for 2 weeks to work on regaining control of the right side of her body. Things weren’t definitely “ok again” by any means, but at least she was out of the woods.

It was clear she was going to make it through to the other side, albeit to a much different life than the one she had before the stroke.

Aside from making sure she had the care she needed, the next important thing to me was understanding how this could happen in the first place. How could someone that was seemingly healthy and relatively active, with no known history of medical problems, suddenly have a life-threatening stroke out of nowhere?

First, I looked at the statistics, and they were extremely stark:

Every year, more than 140,000 people in the US die from a stroke, and it’s the third leading cause of death. It’s the number one cause of disability, something my mom would have to deal with for the rest of her life. When you look at strokes as a part of the broader problem cardiovascular disease, it’s even worse…

Together, the conditions related to cardiovascular disease — stroke, coronary heart disease, etc.— kill more people every year than every form of cancer combined. To put things in perspective, 1 in 31 women in the US will die from breast cancer…but 1 in 3 will die from cardiovascular disease.

To be honest, I had read statistics like this before, but until it a loved one or friend becomes part of one, they are mostly just numbers on a page. When I thought about heart attacks and strokes before this happened, I always thought they happened to people who were overweight, ate poorly, smoked, drank, etc. I didn’t think of people like my mom.

I needed to know more than just the statistics, I needed to understand the cause…

The Truth About Inflammation— Why It Matters To You and Everyone You Know

For months on end, I read every book and research paper that I could get hands on related to cardiovascular disease, stroke, stress, inflammation and everything in between. The more I read, the more interesting things became and the more I wanted to keep reading.

Eventually, I started to see a different picture of health, wellness and disease. It became clear how someone like my mom could go from seemingly good health one day to clinging to life in a hospital the next.

I discovered that the key to understanding how this happened was hidden in the relationship between stress and inflammation. Although just about everyone is familiar with inflammation, the exact way that it works is a mystery to most. This has really only started to become more and more clear in terms of the research in the last ten years or so.

The fairly new field of Neuroimmunology has finally put more of the puzzle pieces together to explain just how stress and inflammation affect the body and how things can go wrong over time…

The Biology of Stress, Survival, and Inflammation — What Keeps You Alive Can Also Kill You

Although everyone is familiar with the term “stress,” most people don’t really understand what it means to the body and how it relates to inflammation. This relationship is absolutely crucial to both survival and how 1 out of every 3 people in this U.S. will ultimately meet their end.

To get to the bottom of how inflammation works, as well as how it can slowly kill you, we have to first talk a bit about the autonomic nervous system (ANS). In case you’re not familiar with it, the ANS is responsible for two major elements that are directly related to your survival.

First, the ANS works to ensure the components of your body’s internal environment — everything from your blood pressure, to your blood sugar, to oxygen levels — are always within normal ranges, no matter what you do to it.

The second thing the ANS does, which is also directly related to the first, is manage both energy production and energy storage. This is another huge component of survival, especially in the sense of our evolutionary biology.

For an animal in the wild, nothing is more crucial when it comes to survival than managing energy. This is a topic I covered in my previous article on CrossFit.

When an animal is racing to catch its prey, or when it’s trying to avoid becoming prey itself, its survival depends on its ability to generate a massive amount of energy as quickly as possible.

The ANS governs energy management effectively through its two branches: the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. It cranks up energy production through its sympathetic side and turns down energy production, while simultaneously turning up energy storage, through opposing actions from the parasympathetic system.

You can see from the chart below how the two systems work together:

Why is this so important to understand? How, exactly, is this a matter of life and death?

Simple. It’s because these two branches of the ANS don’t just manage energy, they also control inflammation. And inflammation is how the stress of life can, and often does, kill you over time.

Life — And the Double-Edged Sword of Stress

To get an idea of how the ANS regulates inflammation, we can look at the way the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems stimulate the release of specific hormones that play different roles to keep us alive.

As you can see, the sympathetic system is part of what’s called the Adrenergic pro-inflammatory pathway and some of the hormones it releases bind to receptors on immune cells called macrophages. This binding causes an amplified immune response in the body. This means that anytime the sympathetic system is activated, the body is going to be in an inherently pro-inflammatory state.

Going back to the role of the ANS in survival, it makes sense that any time there’s a need for increased energy, it’s beneficial to put the immune system on high alert. The sympathetic system was designed for periods requiring a “fight or flight” response. During these periods, you’re not only more likely to be exposed to dangerous pathogens, you’re also much more likely to stress tissues that will need repair.

This is a large part of what the inflammatory response is for in the first place.

During a workout, for example, there are all kinds of metabolic and mechanical stress occurring in various tissues. This stress leads to inflammation and the inflammation signals the brain and starts the repair processes that ultimately lead to bigger, stronger and more functional tissue than you started with.

Without inflammation, this process would never occur and we wouldn’t have the ability to adapt to our environments.

In other words, inflammation is crucial to adaptation and to survival as a whole, but it can also be a double-edged sword.

Acute inflammation is protective. Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, can slowly lead you down the path of cardiovascular disease and death, and that’s exactly what it does to nearly 1 out of every 3 Americans.

Turning Off Inflammation — The Key to Health, Wellness and Longevity

Whether inflammation is your friend or ultimately leads you to become the next statistic largely depends your body’s ability to shut it off when it’s no longer necessary. The other side of the ANS responsible for controlling this process is known as the Cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway.

This pathway inhibits inflammation by releasing acetylcholine that binds to specific receptors on immune cells. Binding to these receptors shuts off the release of pro-inflammatory proteins called cytokines. As you can see from the diagram, inflammation itself is what triggers this anti-inflammatory pathway. The vagus nerve referred to below is the primary nerve of the parasympathetic system.

When the afferent branch of the vagus nerve senses inflammation, it carries this signal to the brain and causes an area called the dorsal motor nucleus (DMN) to trigger the efferent vagus nerve to release acetylcholine and this causes inflammation to be essentially “turned off.” This inflammatory reflex is how the body keeps inflammation from getting out of control — at least that’s what it’s supposed to do.

When Inflammation Goes Wrong

In a perfect world, the body would be exposed to stress, inflammation would be produced and do its job, and then it would be shut off and everything would work perfectly. The problem, however, is that we don’t live in a perfect world and the stress that so many of us put ourselves under on a daily basis can, and often does, take its toll over time.

It’s easy to buy into the idea that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. When it comes to too much stress, however, it kills us, just not right away.

In the case of my mom, for example, it was the stress of her job as a flight attendant that was the primary culprit. In fact, her progression towards disease can be clearly traced to a specific change that added a ton of stress to her life.

For years, she lived in Seattle and was based in San Jose, which meant that a few times a month, she flew 1.5 hours back and forth to go to work. After the events of 9/11, however, the airlines laid off thousands of people, including her.

She was able to get her job back after a couple of years, but she had no choice but to be based in New York. Instead of moving, she decided to make the commute, so she flew back and forth across the country just to go to and from work.

The stress of constant traveling, having an erratic sleep schedule, eating airport food, etc., was simply too much stress on her body. Within a matter of a few years, she ended up in the hospital with the stroke, despite having no obvious warning signs and virtually none of the traditional risk factors.

Don’t get me wrong, there were clearly genetic factors at play as well, but her example illustrates just how important it is to realize the toll that chronic stress takes on the body.

Most people, particularly those that spend hours in the gym, understand the impact of training on the body because it’s something they can feel, but they have no idea of the true effects of mental stress, nutritional stress, environmental stress, etc.

The reality is that even if you kill yourself in the gym a few hours a week — not something I recommend, of course — the amount of stress in those few hours doesn’t compare to the total stress that you can inflict on yourself just through daily life.

Training is an hour or two, life is 24/7. This is a lesson that far too many people don’t learn, my mom included, until it’s too late.

Chronic, low-grade inflammation isn’t something that most people feel. By the time real symptoms start showing up or a medical exam reveals there is something wrong, the damage has already been done.

Fortunately, the story doesn’t have to end like this. There’s something that each and every person can do to combat the inherent stress of life and avoid becoming another sad tale.

The Benefits of Aerobic Fitness — Why Conditioning Isn’t Just For Athletes

By now, the importance of making sure that your body is able to effectively balance the pro- and anti-inflammatory forces that are a fact of life should be obvious. Preventing acute inflammation from becoming chronic, systemic, low-grade inflammation is absolutely essential to preventing the many diseases that plague our society and so many of our loved ones.

Although science can’t yet answer the exact specifics of why or how, one thing that’s abundantly clear is that a high level of aerobic fitness is the most powerful tool we have for increasing the body’s ability to mitigate inflammation. This is because aerobic fitness is directly linked to what’s called vagal tone – the overall function of the vagus nerve at rest.

For proof of this, we can look at a particularly compelling review of 11 different papers on life expectancy and physical activity…

Endurance Really Can Save Your Life

The review, titled, “Does Physical Activity Increase Life Expectancy? A Review of the Literature,” looked at whether being generally active improved life expectancy, as well as if there was any evidence that being an athlete made any additional difference.

As you would probably expect, the review found that people that were active could expect to live about 0.4 to 4.2 years longer than those that weren’t. No big surprise there.

What most people might find surprising, however, is that when the review looked at life expectancy across different populations of athletes, mostly elite athletes, the only group that consistently lived longer than the average person was aerobic endurance athletes. Endurance athletes, in fact, could expect to live between 4.3 and 8 years longer than the average person.

Even more interesting is that some of the studies in the review found that team sport athletes actually had lower life expectancy, by as much as up to 5 years, compared to the average person that was just moderately physically active.

Aside from this review, of course, there’s a mountain of other research that supports higher aerobic fitness is associated with much lower rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, and increased cognitive function and more. Traditionally, this relationship was thought to be due purely to changes in the cardiovascular system itself. However, it’s becoming clearer that a big reason higher aerobic fitness leads to lower risk of the most common diseases is because it protects against chronic inflammation.

One study, for example, Markers of inflammation are inversely associated with V̇o2 max in asymptomatic men” demonstrated an incredibly clear and linear relationship between aerobic fitness (V02 max) and markers of inflammation like C-Reactive Protein and fibrinogen.

When you dig into the research, it becomes incredibly clear that many of the most important benefits of increasing aerobic fitness come from the anti-inflammatory capacities that develop along with it. The importance of this cannot be overstated.

Being big and strong might be cool, but conditioning can be the difference between life and death.

Why I Redefined My Priorities — And Why You May Want to Do the Same

The more I started putting all the pieces of stress, inflammation, and disease together and began understanding how someone like my mom could have a stroke, the more I began to look at my own training and lifestyle.

There is no stronger agent for change than the realization of your own mortality.

I knew I need to shift my priorities and rethink my training. Even though I was used to conditioning high-level combat athletes, my own training primarily consisted of lifting weights and little-to-no aerobic work.

Even worse, the sheer stress of dealing with my mom’s stroke and taking her from one doctor to the next for months on end had taken its toll.

My eating habits and sleep had taken a serious turn for the worse. I didn’t feel good, I had put on 10-15lbs of pure fat and I knew I had to make a change.

Over the weeks, months, and years since that terrible day in 2008, my training and my priorities have dramatically shifted. I don’t care much how much weight I can lift and conditioning is a regular part of most of my training days.

Even though I had already spent a great deal of time studying conditioning to help my combat athletes get ready to fight, the desire to improve my own conditioning and be healthy only fueled that fire to research even more.

A year later, in 2009, I started this website and began writing and speaking on the subject of conditioning.

Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 3 things that every single person that wants to live a long and healthy life, regardless of what their specific fitness goals may be, should follow.

I consider these 3 areas to be the starting points of health and wellness. They are all absolutely essential if you want to avoid becoming just another statistic.

Tip #1: Stop Doing So Much High-Intensity Training and Follow the 80/20 Rule

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned after more than 15 years of being a coach and working with thousands of people, it’s that consistency is a far better path to long-term success than intensity.

In the last 5 years or so, just about everyone has jumped on the high-intensity bandwagon. People all over the U.S. have been convinced that they have to practically kill themselves every time they’re in the gym if they want to get in better shape.

I’ve written about this topic plenty in the past, but it bears repeating. The truth is that while intensity is important, it’s not the only thing that matters.

The biggest problem with high intensity is that it is a huge driver of inflammation, simply because it places so much stress on all the tissues and on the immune system.

Consistency is a far better path to long-term success than intensityTweet

This is why it’s so easy to overtrain when you use too much intensity. It often promotes a chronic state of low-grade inflammation that leads to plateaus, injuries, and worse when continued for too long.

In the last article, I discussed what CrossFit has done right and what has made it successful. Yet their endless focus on high intensity is the thing they’ve gotten completely wrong and where they’ve done more harm than good.

After my mom’s stroke, I cut my own high intensity training down to 2 days per week at most. I also started regularly incorporating low intensity, stress-reducing training methods, like swimming, while focusing on the quality of work much more than the quantity.

The review discussed earlier showed that endurance athletes consistently have lower disease rates and live longer. If my goal is to experience the same benefits, I need to look at how they train.

Another great review on this subject is, “Intervals, Thresholds, and Long Slow Distance: the Role of Intensity and Duration in Endurance Training.”

The review found that when you look at the training intensity distribution across almost all successful endurance athletes, the magic ratio seems to be about 80% low intensityand20% high intensity.

Many of the most promoted programs today do the exact opposite: 80% high intensity and 20% low intensity. Then people wonder why they aren’t getting better and their joints are hurting.

You may not have any desire to be an endurance athlete, there’s a lot to be said for training like one if your goal is to live a long and healthy life free of disease.

Tip#2: Keep Track of Markers of Systemic Inflammation

One of the first things I did after my mom’s stroke was start checking my own inflammatory markers on a regular basis in addition to using heart rate variability (HRV).

The strong correlation between HRV and life expectancy was one of the major reasons I began working on creating BioForce HRV, one of the first truly affordable and easy-to-use systems on the market.

If you’re not familiar with it, you can take this video course to learn more. However, the short story is that HRV is the best marker of the overall function of the vagus nerve. This makes it an incredibly powerful proxy for systemic inflammation.

Given that it takes just a few minutes each day to measure your HRV, it should be a no-brainer for anyone that values their health and wellness.

The key is to be proactive about your health rather than wait until something goes wrongTweet

Aside from that, I also started doing blood work on a quarterly basis to check for systemic markers of inflammation, including hs-CRP (high sensitivity C-reactive protein) as well as homocysteine and fibrinogen and the more standard cholesterol markers.

This is something I’ll do for the rest of my life and something I highly recommend for anyone over the age of 35 or 40, especially if you have any family history of cardiovascular disease or stroke like I do.

When it comes to blood work, it’s best to work with a good doctor. However, it’s also possible to order these tests yourself, as well. The two places I recommend for this are Life Extension and WellnessFX.

With Life Extension, you can choose from literally hundreds of different tests and mix and match them as you like. WellnessFX offers fewer tests and is usually slightly more expensive, but it has a great feature that allows you to visually track your tests over time and see trends as well as anything that may be outside the norm.

Whether you work with your doctor or order your own tests, the key is to be proactive about your health rather than wait until something goes wrong.

Tracking markers of inflammation over time is a very effective and important way to ensure you’re on the right track and to gauge the results of everything from training and nutrition to life stress.

Tip #3: Learn How to Turn Off the Sympathetic System

By now, it should be obvious that the ability to shut off the sympathetic system when you don’t need it is crucial. In fact, it’s equally important to developing aerobic fitness and the body’s potential to mitigate inflammation.

This ability is a highly undervalued skill. Just like any other skill, it also requires effort and practice to master.

The first place to start developing this skill is at the end of your workouts. Using a heart rate monitor, perform a cool down and make the goal to drop your heart rate back towards your normal resting level as quickly as possible. Try performing a 90/90 breathing drill and see how quickly you can get your heart rate to drop.

The key here is to learn how to consciously control your energy expenditure to reduce sympathetic activity. With a little practice, you should be able to get your heart rate all the way back down to within 5-10 bpm of our resting heart rate in as little as 3-5 minutes.

If you’re having a hard time, one of the best ways to improve this is by using some of the PRI breathing exercises. Take a course yourself or work with someone that’s experienced with the protocols to really get the most out of them.

Not only will this help you develop a valuable skill, it will also speed up recovery. The faster the sympathetic system comes down, the sooner the parasympathetic can turn on to drive down inflammation and promote recovery and regeneration.

Once you’ve learned how to turn off the sympathetic system after you work out, the next step is to start practicing it every night before you go to sleep. This will go a long way toward improving the quality of your sleep, which plays a huge role in mitigating inflammation and facilitating recovery.

It’s also important to eliminate caffeine as much as possible both after your workouts and within a few hours before bedtime. Stimulants increase sympathetic function, and, as we discussed earlier, this sympathetic activity is what drives inflammation.

After your workout and in the hours leading up to bedtime, the last thing you want is to have is too much sympathetic drive. It seems that 3/4 of the population lives on a constant caffeine drip. If this applies to you, I strongly recommend working to change it.

Doing the little things to eat better, train smarter, and learn how to consciously shut off the sympathetic system is one of the most powerful ways to take control of your health and wellness.

All’s Well that Ends Well— Sort Of

Although my mom unfortunately never made a full recovery, she was able to make it through the most difficult thing anyone could ever go through and come out on the other side. She is now happily living in a retirement community where she’s made a ton of friends. While she wasn’t able to get back to her career flying, she’s discovered social media and how to use emojis to keep in touch with everyone.

Even though she doesn’t get out as much as I’d like her to — it doesn’t help that she practically lives on Amazon half the time — she does get in the gym at least three days a week and is making an effort to be active.

Her diet has also dramatically improved and she’s getting more than enough sleep. While the transition hasn’t been easy for her at times, she still has a positive outlook moving forward.

My mom’s story is just one of millions out there, and in this country, someone dies from a stroke every 4 minutes. Chances are that almost everyone reading this article has been through something similar with a friend or loved one, or at least will at some point.

The sad truth is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Research has shown that up to 80% of the deaths related to heart disease and stroke are attributable to preventable factors.

The point of sharing this personal story with you is simply to offer my experience of watching a loved one go through the unnecessary consequences of a life filled with too much stress and too little conditioning.

I’ve shared the lessons I’ve learned along the way in the hopes that they may help you see stress in a different way and realize the true value of conditioning and its impact on health.

Conditioning may not be a magic pill, but for now, it’s the closest thing to we have.

Next Step: Get the Education You Need to Help Yourself (Or Your Clients)

Conditioning isn’t just something elite athletes need. Instead, it’s imperative that we all know how to take care of ourselves and train properly.

But this is especially important if you work directly with clients as a coach or trainer.

Whether you train athletes or general population clients, YOU are helping them become healthier and more resilient. That’s a big responsibility. Unfortunately, most coaches haven’t yet built the practical skills required to effectively write and coach successful conditioning programs.

Become 100% confident in your ability to write conditioning programs that work

I’ve compiled everything I’ve learned about conditioning into one complete, practical, self-study system. My goal is to help you feel 100% confident in your ability to write and coach successful conditioning programs — no matter what kind of clients you work with. Learn more now about how my course will help you do exactly that.

Whether you love it or hate it, there’s no denying that CrossFit has had a bigger impact on the fitness industry than anything else in the last 20 years. In the span of just a few years, CrossFit went from little more than an underground website posting workouts to a Reebok-sponsored, multi-million dollar behemoth with new gyms popping up around every corner.…Read More

Whether you love it or hate it, there’s no denying that CrossFit has had a bigger impact on the fitness industry than anything else in the last 20 years. In the span of just a few years, CrossFit went from little more than an underground website posting workouts to a Reebok-sponsored, multi-million dollar behemoth with new gyms popping up around every corner.

Almost overnight, the term “CrossFitting” was born and millions of people jumped on the bandwagon.

Although just about everyone these days has an opinion about whether or not the explosion of CrossFit has been a good thing or a bad thing – and although there’ve been a million CrossFit-bashing articles – what I want to share with you is something much more important… how CrossFit can make you a better coach.

Yes… you read that right. If you’re familiar with my articles or books and you know with my training philosophy, you’re probably surprised to hear me say that every coach can learn something from CrossFit, but it’s the truth…

I say this because once you understand why CrossFit works – the secret that has driven millions of people to pay good money to do the same calisthenics they hated doing in gym class as kids–you’ll discover that it’s not that hard to put the same incredibly powerful secret to work for you.

Whether you’re a coach, trainer, gym owner, or anything in between, it’s not an understatement to say that discovering the real power behind CrossFit is one of the most valuable lessons you’ll ever learn.

Why working out is too much work

Before I get to the heart of how this lesson will make you a better coach, build a more successful business, and deliver better results, we have to first look at why so many training programs fail in the first place.

We need to understand the answers to questions like:

Why do millions of people start going to the gym every January only to quit in February?

Why does 80% of the US population fail to get even the minimum recommended amount of exercise?

Why are two out of every three people in the US overweight and one out of every three considered obese?

Why is it so much easier to put on weight than it is to lose it?

Though it can be easy to blunt the answers with a simple dismissal that most people are just “lazy,” the truth is much more complicated. The real answers are embedded in how we’re hardwired as human beings.

In other words, the single reason the vast majority of people don’t workout, or even do much activity at all, is because exercising is extremely costly energetically and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from a biological standpoint.

We’re all hardwired for survival

In nature, survival depends on the ability to find food and avoid starvation. When animals are unable to do this, of course, they die. So decisions about energy expenditure and energy storage are literally hardwired into our biology.

We’re preprogrammed to expend energy only when necessary and that means when there’s a reward – or at least the brain predicts there will be a reward – for doing so.

This is such a well-researched area of biology that there’s an entire theory, called “Optimal Foraging Theory,” that helps explain animal behavior when it comes to searching for food. The theory goes something like this: in order for animals to find food, they have to expend a certain number of calories as part of the searching and gathering process.

If a wild animal burns more calories finding food than the food actually provides, it’s only a matter of time before the animal starves to death.

This means that in order to survive, animal brains are constantly optimizing decisions about how much energy to expend gathering in one place before it’s more beneficial to travel to another, more food-dense foraging site. These are literally life and death decisions and natural selection has favored animals that are better at this strategy than others.

Supermarkets don’t change our biology

We may not have to scour the forests for food, but our brains are still hardwired to make sure that when we expend energy, there’s a good reason for it. Our genetics don’t know that we can make a single trip to Costco and get enough food to last a year.

Our brains are still working to optimize our energy expenditure based on survival instincts, which means not doing things like working out unless there’s a very good reason for it.

Think about it: working out is literally nothing more expending a massive amount of energy, not just during the workout itself, but also afterward when energy is allocated to repairing and rebuilding tissues that were stressed during the workout.

In nature, it’s better to lay around and conserve your energy until you need it to find food. It doesn’t pay to be jacked and tan.

That’s the single biggest reason why the majority of people don’t work out and why such a large percentage of the population is overweight…

Is working out really worth it?

This is why it’s so hard to lose weight, why so many people quit working out a month after they start, and why it can take weeks to lose a few pounds of fat that seemed to only take a few days to put on.

We’re designed to store calories easier than we burn them and only move when there’s a really good reason to (like fending off a lion or gathering food). It’s just human nature.

As a society, we’re obsessed with finding more and more ways to do less and less work. We order from Amazon so we don’t have to leave our houses to shop, we have pre-made meals shipped to our houses so we don’t have to cook, we email and text people sitting in offices next to ours so we don’t have to walk across the hall.

We’re better at finding ways to avoid having to move and burn calories than just about anything else. So it shouldn’t be surprising that so many people don’t workout, or even get off the couch, if they can avoid it.

The chemical that changes everything (and fuels CrossFit’s success)

When it comes to making the decision to go to the gym or sit on the couch, dopamine is the most important chemical in our brains. Yet most people are dead wrong about when this chemical comes into play. Popular belief pits dopamine as the reward/pleasure chemical–something we’re constantly seeking out and that’s driving our behaviors.

Instead, science has shown that dopamine isn’t about the reward – it doesn’t spike when we get the reward and it has nothing to do with feeling pleasure – it’s about the prediction of reward, and this is a very different thing.

We don’t seek out behaviors and activities that lead to a big spike in dopamine production. What causes us to behave a certain way is actually the spike in dopamine before we even act.

The way most people think of dopamine is backward. It’s the dopamine that drives behavior, not the other way around.

Monkeys don’t work out

The fact that dopamine spikes in response to a predicted reward has been proven over and over again in animal research. The classic example is a monkey learning to press a level to get a reward (food). Researchers first condition the monkey to press the lever by giving a cue — usually turning on a light or making a noise—and then the monkey learns that pressing the lever causes food to be dispensed.

It’s pretty clear that the rise in dopamine doesn’t happen when the monkey gets the reward, as most people would expect. Instead, it rises after the signal and drives the monkey to press the lever in the first place.

How do we know this?

When scientists administer a drug that blocks the rise of dopamine, the monkey no longer presses the lever, even though it knows that it’s the only way to can get the food.

The lesson is simple: no rise in dopamine, no work.

Dopamine is the brain’s way of predicting the reward, of determining whether or not the work is worth the energy. This single principle has huge implications when it comes to working out.

When working out doesn’t work

Given the true role of dopamine in driving work that leads to a reward, it should start to become clear why so many people don’t work out, or at least don’t work out for very long before quitting.

Everyone loves that initial feeling of making quick gains. It conditions the brain to expect a big payoff from all the work. This predicted reward leads to a large dopamine spike that precedes the workout, and that spike is what strongly motivates the person to work out.

Remember, dopamine is what drives behavior, so lots of dopamine = a high motivation to train.

The big problem with fitness, however, is that progress is never linear. Those initially rapid gains inevitably start slowing down, usually within a matter of weeks.

Once this happens, everything changes.

As soon as the reward diminishes, the brain starts to realize that its prediction was wrong – the work isn’t leading the same level of reward. So the brain adjusts the pre-workout rise in dopamine accordingly.

From a survival standpoint, why would the brain promote energy expenditure (work) if there isn’t a very clear reward for doing so? In the wild, this is a sure-fire recipe for extinction.

This is why you don’t see animals doing push-ups.

Well, except this one:

The genius of CrossFit

The “laziness” I talked about in the beginning of this article can be explained by two phenomena:

the brain’s unyielding will to survive and manage energy expenditure via changes in motivation

the inherent, nonlinear nature of training results

As soon as the brain fails to see the results it expects from pouring energy into training, dopamine levels take a nose dive and the motivation to train goes along with them.

These diminishing returns are nothing more than biology at work. Until CrossFit came along, it didn’t seem like there was a good way around this. Conventional programs fail the vast majority of the time, to the point that 80% of the US population doesn’t even try.

What CrossFit unknowingly did to change all this, however, is nothing short of genius. By completely altering the way the brain perceives and predicts the reward of training, CrossFit found a way to hijack our dopamine-driven behaviors altogether.

Crossfit shifted the workout goal from a particular result (reward) – such as a change in body composition – to simply finishing the workout.

Completing the “workout of the day” literally became the training goal rather than any specific changes in body composition or fitness. CrossFit even redefined “fitness” entirely as some vague “broad time and modal domains” terminology that’s impossible to measure.

The beauty of this is that if you can’t measure something, you can’t see that it may not actually be improving. The brain never receives negative feedback when the hard work fails to produce any reward. Dopamine levels never decrease to the point that you would rather sit on the couch than go train CrossFit.

Like I said, it’s pure genius.

The Prime Now generation

People do not feel more compelled to do a CrossFit workout than other forms of training because it’s monumentally more effective or new in any way. No, people do it because they get a sense of satisfaction and reward once they’ve put in the work and finished the workout of the day.

The fact that CrossFit perpetuates the idea that these workouts are incredibly high intensity and difficult to do only furthers the sense of reward from “conquering” a workout.

Put in the work, get the reward, put in the work, get the reward. It’s easy to see how this drives up dopamine and prevents the negative feedback that occurs when specific goals take months or even years to achieve.

If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that our society cares more and more about the immediacy of everything. Getting our orders delivered from Amazon in two days isn’t fast enough. We want Prime Now so we can get packages in two hours.

There’s a reason that Amazon is investing in technology like drones to deliver things even faster. Now is always better than later.

Most people, though not all, are generally very bad at putting in a lot of work when the payout is very far off. Our brains are much more oriented toward seeking out and reinforcing behaviors that lead to immediate rewards. This is where CrossFit excels and it’s something every coach can learn from.

Lesson #1: Always focus on short-term goals

If you have to take away one single lesson from the rise and success of CrossFit, it’s this: people are generally compelled toward behavior that delivers immediate results and away from behavior that doesn’t seem to produce any reward.

You wouldn’t likely go to work every day if you weren’t getting paid. Similarly, you wouldn’t expect dopamine levels to stay elevated when the massive amount of energy you’re expending isn’t causing the scale to move, the weights to feel lighter, or the running to get easier.

If you really want to be a good coach, you should start each and every workout with, “Today’s goals are…”Tweet

Why do the work if you aren’t getting paid for it?

If the only goals your clients are focused on are goals that are inherently slow moving and nonlinear in nature, it’s only a matter of time before their motivation decreases as they plateau.

The way to approach this problem is to teach your clients to focus not on the long-term goals, but on the process of achieving them. Whether it’s getting in enough steps, completing the workout they had planned, avoiding foods they know they shouldn’t be eating, or anything else, you can help your clients stay motivated simply by shifting the focus towards achieving these very short-term goals.

If you really want to be a good coach, you should start out each and every workout with, “Today’s goals are….” and give them 2-3 things that you want to achieve in the session.

At the end of every session, you should review what your clients accomplished, how many calories they burned, how many steps they took, what their average heart rate was, how many sets they did, PRs, they set, etc., and reinforce that they accomplished something and the work was worth it.

Even though things like weight loss and strength in major lifts are never going to be linear, you can use a variety of factors within a workout to show progress and set goals. The goal may be as simple as increasing a single lift by 5lbs from the previous workout or doing 3 more reps on a given exercise. My point is that any reward is better than no reward.

No reward for a lot of work is the biggest motivation killer there is, so you must avoid it at all costs.

Your clients don’t have to hit every single goal that you set for them in every single workout. In fact, it’s better if they don’t or it won’t seem like the goals were difficult enough and there won’t be satisfaction in achieving them. However, they do have to see progress from one workout to the next to prevent a drop in dopamine and motivation.

Setting the right goals is crucial, which brings us to lesson #2:

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Lesson #2: Always strive to underpromise and overdeliver

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when working with a new client is to set unrealistic expectations that are almost impossible to meet. This is an easy mistake to make because training is a business for most people and every business relies on getting new clients, which means sales have to be made.

During the sales process, it’s easy to see why a trainer would want to overpromise the results that the client can expect. This is only exacerbated by the fact that just about every client you’ll ever work has unrealistic expectations to start with.

The problem is that the fitness industry is full of hype marketing. Just pick up the cover of any major fitness magazine and read the headlines, or watch the late-night infomercials with professional models and photoshopped before-and-after photos to see what you’re up against.

Remember, dopamine and motivation are driven by the predicted reward and whether or not that those predictions turn out to be accurate, more than the actual reward itself.

To illustrate what I mean, consider two new training clients that both want to lose weight. Imagine that Client A is told that it’s reasonable to expect to lose 5lbs in the first month of training. Client B, on the other hand, is told to expect 10lbs of weight loss.

What do you think will happen to their dopamine levels and motivation if they both end up losing 5lbs?

Remember, both of them were putting in the work based on the predicted rewards. When client B’s results fall short, he or she is disappointed and his/her dopamine levels drop. Client A’s results are exactly as predicted, so his or her dopamine levels are expected to remain the same.

Now imagine if Client A actually lost 6 or 7lbs. In this case, it’s likely his or her motivation would actually go up because dopamine levels will increase as the brain recognizes an even greater than anticipated reward.

CrossFit gets around the potential for negative feedback by avoiding goals related to anything other than completing the workout. There are drawbacks to this approach as a long-term strategy, however – something that you can see by the number of CrossFit gyms closing their doors these days. A better approach is to focus on achieving goals within each and every workout, but also tie them to other areas that are important to your clients as well.

This means that aside from always using short-term goals, the next most important thing to keep in mind is that the goals you set must be both realistic and achievable for your clients. An unrealistic goal is never a good thing and it’s your job as their coach or trainer to avoid these at all costs.

Telling a prospective client that your program is going to increase his/her squat by 50lbs in two weeks– something you’d expect to read on a magazine cover – might seem like a good way to get a new client, but it’s definitely not the right way to keep one for very long.

Lesson #3: Introduce intermittent reinforcement

The connection between CrossFit and gambling may seem like a stretch, but when you look at how dopamine functions in situations where this is something called “intermittent reinforcement,” it’s easy to see the connection.

Going back to our example of a lever-pressing monkey, scientists have also researched what happens when different reward variables are introduced.

The most interesting variation is when researcher only gave the monkey a reward 50% of the time. The monkeys see the same signal, press the same lever, but half the time they get the reward and half the time they get nothing.

Think of it as gambling for monkeys.

In these cases, what do you think happens to dopamine levels and the motivation to do the work? Although it might seem logical that less frequent rewards would lead to a lower level of dopamine, research actually shows that the opposite is true.

As you can see from the graph, when reward uncertainty is introduced into the equation, dopamine levels actually double! In other words, we are strongly compelled toward behaviors that lead to somewhat unpredictable outcomes.

Predictable rewards drive behavior as well, of course, but when we are only rewarded some of the time, it’s an incredibly powerful motivator. It turns out that “maybe” is very hard to resist.

Whether it’s checking your email a hundred times a day, watching for notifications on social media every 10 minutes, or constantly chasing after the girl or guy that may or may not be interested, we’re inherently driven towards unpredictable rewards.

Vegas learned this lesson a long time ago

Though craving unpredictable outcomes may seem completely counterintuitive to the biology of survival, scientists believe that it is actually essential. This makes sense when you revisit the idea of foraging for food: the search does not always result in a reward.

If biology only drove behaviors that produced a reward 100% of the time, what would happen to the animal that spends three days hunting for food without finding any? Without the innate tendency to chase unpredictable rewards, it would simply give up.

When it comes to CrossFit, the unpredictability and variety of the workout is part of what compels people to do it. Even if it can be effective, doing the same workout over and over again is boring for most people.

Because you never know what the workout of the day is going to be until you get to the gym, there’s a level of uncertainty that reinforces the motivation to train. Just like people love the sound of a new text message because they don’t know for sure who it’s from, people are more motivated (subconsciously) to go to the gym so they can find out what the workout for the day is going to be.

The most powerful word

Maybe there will be a particular exercise that you’re really good at and love doing?

Maybe the workout will have something totally new that you’ve never done before?

“Maybe” is a powerful word, indeed. The way to use this power to your advantage is to introduce some unpredictability into your training programs. While I definitely don’t advocate making everything completely random to the extent that CrossFit often does, there is something to be said for introducing variety into your program every couple of weeks.

It can be as simple as using a kettlebell instead of a dumbbell, performing an exercise backwards, introducing a different warm-up drill, etc. Variety doesn’t have to mean that everything is different all the time, but some level of unpredictability and novelty is good for keeping your clients coming back for more.

Even better, introduce random rewards such as a free t-shirt, a gift card to a local restaurant, etc., at different stages of your program. Giving a client a completely unexpected $10 gift card as a thanks for their business can go a very long way in keeping them coming back again and again. Unexpected and unpredictable rewards are incredibly powerful subconscious motivators

This is what customer loyalty (rewards) programs are all about and why ever major company out there uses them. If you’re serious about being an effective coach and keeping your clients’ motivation to train with you as high as possible, there’s no better way than to use the science of gambling and addiction to your advantage.

What to do next:

Getting the best results and being a successful coach requires more than just the right program, it requires the right approach.

Coaches often struggle with putting all the pieces together and knowing the most effective ways to get clients and athletes to listen to their advice and follow their programs.

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When I was first getting into the field of strength and conditioning, I remember feeling overwhelmed any time I was asked to write out a training program for someone. I’d often spend hours writing out a single program, only to decide it wasn’t good enough and start over. From the very beginning, I was fortunate enough to be working with some very high-level athletes — and that meant a lot of responsibility.…Read More

When I was first getting into the field of strength and conditioning, I remember feeling overwhelmed any time I was asked to write out a training program for someone. I’d often spend hours writing out a single program, only to decide it wasn’t good enough and start over. From the very beginning, I was fortunate enough to be working with some very high-level athletes — and that meant a lot of responsibility.

The last thing I wanted to do was to give them a program that didn’t work or deliver the results they were expecting. I never wanted to be the reason they lost a fight, or the game, or didn’t make the team.

Like most coaches getting started in the field, I was young, excited and passionate about training and helping everyone I was working with get better, but I quickly I realized that I had far more questions than answers when it came time to put pen to paper…

What exercises should I use? How many sets should I have them do?

How should I break up the training week? Should I use block training or conjugate periodization?

Do I really understand what those terms even mean?

For a long time, I thought the more reading and the more studying I did, the easier things would become. I tore through book after book – I even read Supertraining from cover to cover – and literally traveled around the world going to different workshops and learning from different experts.

I was convinced that the key to being a great coach was just stuffing my head with as much information about programming as I could. If I just studied enough different periodization models and kept trying to make heads or tails out of soviet training manuals written 30 years ago, I figured that writing programs would eventually become easy.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way…

Like most coaches, I struggled to put all the pieces together.

The more books on training and programming I read, the less confident I felt in my ability to program. Even worse, I wasn’t getting faster at writing programs, I was getting slower.
The term “paralysis by analysis” described my programming efforts perfectly.

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s an extremely common problem in the training world.

Everyone wants to be the best trainer or coach possible, everyone wants to write world-class programs that deliver results…but at one time or another, literally everyone struggles with how to put all the pieces together to actually do it.

This is why I get far more questions about how to program than anything else. Programming can be challenging and there are so many different ways it can be done and different opinions on what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s easy to get lost in the details and miss the big picture.

This is likely the way things would have continued for me if I hadn’t stumbled upon something that changed the way I approached writing programs altogether.

Ironically, the solution to my problem didn’t come from reading more about training or programming at all.

I created my own system to build world-class programs — and that’s when everything changed.

You see, at the time, I had opened my own gym a few years ago. Like so many other small gym owners, I quickly discovered I knew a whole lot more about training than about running a business and I knew I had to do something about it.

I had no problem staying busy training clients and athletes all day long, but when it came time to doing everything else that you have to do to run a business, I was mostly lost. In an effort to fix things and make sure I stayed in business, I did the same thing I had always done…I started reading everything I could find on the subject.

Fortunately, this time my efforts paid off fairly quickly, but in a way I could never have anticipated.

One of the first books I read was called The E Myth by Michael Gerber and it was a book about the single biggest reason why most small businesses fail : they lack systems.

Systems are what make it possible to successfully scale a business from a small, single restaurant into a billion dollar franchise – think McDonalds, Subway, Chipotle, etc.

When you go into any of those restaurants, literally anywhere in the country, it’s exactly the same. The layouts are the same, the lighting is the same, the food tastes the same, etc.

The reason they are all the same is because they are all running the same systems.

Although this may seem like common sense, and I’m the first to admit it’s definitely not rocket science, but it made me realize something I had been missing all along…

Not only did I lack systems to build my business properly, I lacked a system to build programs. I realized that creating a system was the only way I was going to ever really get good at writing programs.

Writing a successful program and building a successful business have a lot in common.

To do both well you have to know how to put together a lot of different pieces. If you don’t have the right process in place, the result is usually chaos and results will suffer.

Building your own system will solve your problems and help you write more effective programs in half the time.Tweet

Over the next few years, I spent a ton of time working on creating my own system to write programs. At first, I started out with big checklists and processes to build programs that helped organize everything.

I started getting better and more confident in writing good programs, but it was still taking me far too long to get everything done. I knew I had the right idea, systemization was the answer I had been looking for, I just needed to figure out how to simplify writing programs into the fewest steps possible.

Eventually, I was able to streamline the entire system into just five steps. After doing it over and over again, I realized that no matter who I was writing a program for, whether it was a combat athlete, a housewife, a Microsoft executive, or anyone in between, the same five steps were all that were needed.

Become 100% confident in your ability to write conditioning programs that work

I’ve compiled everything I’ve learned about conditioning into one complete, practical, self-study system. My goal is to help you feel 100% confident in your ability to write and coach successful conditioning programs — no matter what kind of clients you work with. Learn more now about how my course will help you do exactly that.

Today, I can create an entire program in 15 minutes or less using this simple 5-step system.

I don’t waste time worrying about the details, I don’t feel like I’m starting from scratch each time I create a new program and I know my programs are going to deliver results because the system has been proven.

If you’ve ever struggled to put all the pieces together, or felt like writing programs was a chore that you put off until the last minute because it takes too long, I guarantee building your own system will solve your problems and help you write more effective programs in half the time.

At this point, I’ve written more programs than I could ever count using this 5-step system. Put simply: It works.

Whether you’re a strength and conditioning coach, a personal trainer, or an athlete that writes your own program, I guarantee following the five steps I’ve outlined below will make your life easier and your programs more effective.

1. Set specific goals for the training block

The first place to start when it comes time to put your putting your programming system to work is to start by setting the goals of the training block. Though the term “block training” has been thrown around and given different meanings in recent years, the simplest way to think about a training block is a period of time where you’re focusing on improving one particular area of fitness.

If your testing and assessment showed there was a weakness in conditioning, for example, then you’d want to put together a conditioning block where the methods, exercises, etc. are put together and designed to improve it.

For all intents and purposes, a training block is nothing more than a period of time where everything is designed to address a specific goal, so of course defining that goal is the place to start.

Although it may be tempting to set goals that are very general, using overly broad terms like, “I want to improve conditioning” is a big mistake and one made far too often. To build an effective program, the goals have to be very specific and most importantly, they need to be measureable.

If you don’t have a specific and measureable goal, after all, how can you have any idea if you’re actually working towards it? Overly vague goals make it impossible to measure progress and get the program off on the wrong foot.

Your methods, exercises, etc., should all be focused around working to hit the program goals, so the more specific you can make them, the better.

What I’m talking about are goals like improving VO2max from 64 to 67, lowering resting HR from 60bpm down to 55bpm, increasing heart rate variability from 75 to 80, hitting conditioning test specific numbers, etc. These are the right type of goals.

You wouldn’t build a strength program without any idea of what lifts you’re trying to improve strength in, so you should never write a conditioning program without first defining what numbers you’re working to specifically improve.

For conditioning programs, it’s typically best to start with no more than 2-3 of this type of goal. You want to build a program that’s focused and trying to 10 different goals is a recipe for a program that will try to do too many things at once.

2. Set the time frame

Once you’ve established specific goals for the program, the next step is to figure out exactly how long it’s going to take to achieve them. Of course, this often means that step one and step two go together because if you only have six weeks to get an athlete ready for the season, you’re going to be setting different goals than if they’re just starting their off-season.

In other words, the amount of time you have to work with always dictates what is realistic in terms of setting goals for the program. If you’re not dealing with any particular deadlines, however, you still want to create a timeframe for achieving the goals you set in step one and for conditioning programs.

Conditioning programs are almost always most effective when they are built around 8-12 week time frames. Why 8-12 weeks?

Simple…this is enough time to see a dedicated improvement in conditioning, but not so much that it is likely to lead to overuse injuries, overtraining and/or mental burnout. Let’s face it, people do much better when they are focused on reaching short-term goals instead of longer ones.

People will work harder when their goals are weeks away rather than several months or years. There’s a reason that you don’t see gyms flooded with people trying to get in shape to look good for the summer in the middle of October and why P90x wasn’t named P300x.

Once you’ve set the overall time frame for the conditioning block, you’ll also want to break this period up into shorter phases. The methods and exercises typically remain mostly constant during each of these phases.

As you can see in the slide above, if you’re building a program for someone that already has a higher level of conditioning to start with, you’ll often want to use a 12-week block broken up into two to three phases. For those with a lower starting point, it’s easier to make progress in shorter periods of time, so an 8-week block with two phases is the way to go.

3. Organize training week for each phase

When most people think of a training program, the first thing they consider is the weekly plan – the microcyle. No doubt this is the central component of every program, but by now you should realize why you can’t design an effective weekly plan without first setting the goals and the time frame you’re working with.

After you’ve outlined those two elements, putting together the weekly plan is the next and most logical step. The place to start that is by outlining what should be done on each day in terms of the overall training load, i.e. how much volume and intensity will be used and what’s the emphasis, instead of just trying to write in the exercises.Thinking about the training week only in terms of what exercises are done on each day is a common approach that often leads to less than effective programs. Which methods and exercises are most appropriate depends on the training emphasis that particular day and is the place to start.As you can see from the chart below, when I write programs, I segment the training week into three different types of training days, each representing a different level of volume and intensity:As the name implies, development days are where the highest volumes and intensities are used and the purpose is to push the body to its limits. After years of working with people of all fitness levels, if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that nobody can recover well and avoid overtraining and/or injury from more than three of these days per week – at least not for any real length of time.

Because of this, you want to start outlining the training week by selecting which days will be development days. Although there are exceptions, it’s generally best to take at least one day of lighter work, either a stimulation day or regeneration day – which I’ll outline momentarily – before repeating another development day.

Just keeping this simple principle of no more than 3 days of maximum volume and intensity will go a long way towards making sure your programs are effective, without being likely to lead to overuse injuries.

The next type of day you’ll want to layout within the training week is what I call a stimulation day. Unlike a development day, the purpose of a stimulation day is merely to provide enough volume and intensity to maintain fitness and heighten the body’s functions.

This means stimulation days can include either high intensities at low volumes, or moderate intensities at moderate volume. In other words, while these types of workouts are challenging, they shouldn’t cause someone to finish the workout face down on the gym floor.

The third and final type of training day that should be used is a regeneration day. If there’s one type of day that’s used far too little in my opinion, it’s regeneration days. The purpose of this type of day is obvious, it helps speed up recovery and allows for greater training volumes without overtraining.

People often include rest days within the training week, but passive rest alone is often not enough to truly help the body recover. Regeneration days feature active recovery methods, whether it’s a light workout with concentric only exercise, getting some soft tissue work, performing an activity like swimming, etc., this type of day is absolutely vital to long-term programming success and something missing from far too many programs.

You can see how a typical training week should look and where regeneration should fit in by looking at the example below:

Once you’ve made the decision about where to incorporate the three different type of training days, you’ll be well on your way to designing an effective and well orchestrated training week and ready to plug in the methods and exercises.

4.Determine methods and exercises for each phase

If you’ve read my book Ultimate MMA Conditioning, or even just read through various articles on the site, you’ve no doubt realized one of the biggest differences in my approach and that of many others is that I focus heavily on training methods over training exercises.

To me, one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the programming process is to start by thinking of programming as nothing more than a series of different exercises. When starting with this mindset, it is like trying to build a pyramid from the top down and the program results are almost always less than they could be.

This is why it’s so important to have a system when it comes to writing programs, it forces you to work through the process step-by-step in a way that naturally leads to a much more effective program in the end. This is another one of the biggest things I quickly learned once I started developing my programming system.

Having a system makes everything easier because each step in the process is a building block for the next one to be set on.

Along those lines, instead of working from the top down, exercises should only be thought of as extensions of the methods that are used and of course the methods that you choose depend heavily on the layout of the training week as discussed above.If you’re planning a development day, for example, you’ll of course want to select higher intensity methods and then pick corresponding exercises that fit well into those demands. Likewise, if your plan calls for a regeneration day, you’ll want to avoid those same high intensity methods and exercises and pick something that’s more appropriate.

The five most important factors to consider when choosing both methods and exercises are:

The goals of training block

Fitness level of the athlete

Individual testing & assessment results

Time of year

Available equipment

To really speed up the process of writing programs and make your system that much more powerful, it’s important to create a database of the methods and exercises that you like to use when you program. Whether you use a simple tool like excel, or more complex software, building a database is as simple as creating a categorized list that you can turn to each time you create a new program.

Over time, chances are that you’ll both add and subtract from this database as you refine and develop your programming strategies over time. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that less is often more when it comes to building programs.

If you look at the programs of many of the most successful coaches out there, you won’t find a hundred different exercises or methods, but rather very few. This is because with the right system in place, it becomes much easier to determine which methods are effective and which ones aren’t.

When used properly, your conditioning system will help you streamline your programs to the bare essentials of what’s most effective. Instead of feeling overwhelmed and wasting time agonizing over which exercise to choose, you’ll effortlessly be able to plugin the ones that you’ve found work the best and avoid creating what I like to call “kitchen sink” programs that have become so common.
Again, this is the beauty of having a system in place rather than just starting from scratch each and every time you develop a program. McDonald’s had it right, systemization creates consistency and consistency leads to progress.

5.Model the volume and intensity

If there’s one aspect of programming that almost every coach and trainer would agree can be extremely challenging, it’s periodization.

Although countless books have been written on the subject and endless models portrayed with fancy graphs and charts, the truth is that a lot of coaches don’t have a very good handle on how to effectively use periodization within their programs.

Stated in the simplest of terms, periodization is the manipulation of volume and intensity over the course of the training program.

The single reason why periodization is so important?

Simple, volume and intensity are the two biggest drives that lead to changes in fitness and performance and if you don’t change either one for weeks on end, the result will invariably be a plateau.

Without the right periodization model, a program doesn’t really extend beyond the training week. WIth the right model, however, steady, long-term improvements in conditioning can be achieved without frustrating plateaus and/or overtraining related injuries and problems.

Although a discussion of all the different periodization models and their pros and cons will have to be a topic for another day, I do want to offer some tips on the overall structure of how periodization should be applied.

As you can see in the graphic below, periodization should consist of four stages – introduction, loading, stabilization and restoration.

The purpose of each of these four stages is to use changes in volume and intensity to drive improvements in fitness.

During the introduction phase, typically 2 weeks in length on average, the new program is introduced and you’ll likely see rapid increases as the result of as nothing more than the body getting used to the new type of stress.

It’s not necessary to use high levels of intensity or volume in the introduction phase because it’s unnecessary and can lead to overtraining in the later parts of the program if too much is used in the beginning. This is another mistake that’s often made as people get excited to start the new program and think the more volume and intensity they use, the better.

The next phase of a well periodized program is the loading phase. As the name implies, this is where volume and/or intensity begins to consistently increase in order to push the body to continue improving.

The loading phase is the most challenging because if the increase in loading is too high, overtraining and injuries can result. If the overall loading is too low, however, then plateaus are inevitable and the higher the level of athlete, the finer this line between the two becomes.

The real key here is to start with rather small changes, no more than 5% per week in terms of volume or intensity and gauge the result. If progress isn’t made, increase by more than that the next week.

As long as there is consistency in training and the overall training load – the combination of volume and intensity – is increased in one way or another during the loading phase, the body will continue to adapt and fitness will increase. The length of the loading phase, most often 4-8 weeks, dictates how volume and intensity should be changed over time. Longer programs typically require bigger changes in volume, while shorter ones should be more driven on intensity.

Upon completion of the loading phase, the next step is to give the body a chance to stabilize at the new levels of stress. Far too often, this phase is completely missing from programs and right after loading, the program progresses into a “deload” or recovery week.

The problem with this strategy is that the body needs time to achieve a new set point. A sudden decrease in loading right after the loading phase will often lead to a decrease in fitness more than anything else.

The stabilization phase should last 1-2 weeks and it should generally feature roughly the same load throughout that time. Again, this is absolutely vital to make sure that the improvements in fitness “stick” so to speak and aren’t just transient in nature.

Once the body has stabilized, the final phase is the restoration phase. Here again, it can be common to feel the need to make drastic reductions in volume and/or intensity.

It’s easy to understand why this may seem like the right idea, but again this can lead to negative changes if the decreases are too big, or for too long. A general rule of thumb is to keep intensity at 90% of what it was in the stabilization phase, while reducing volume by 20-30% at most.

These are only general guidelines, of course, but they’ve worked well for me and as long as you’ve followed the previous four steps in the system, they’ll do the same for you. Even though periodization can be as complex a subject as you want to make it and you can spend hours debating and agonizing its finer points, keeping things simple here is always better. Each and every week within the loading phase if you simply work to adding a few sets here and there, strive to add weight to the bar or train at higher heart rates, use shorter rest periods, etc., and follow the four stages outlined above, you’ll find periodization doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective.

Building your own system

Now that I’ve outlined the five step system I use to create world-class conditioning programs in 15 minutes or less, it’s time for you to start building your own system and putting it to work in your programming.

There may be an initial investment in time and effort up front, but I guarantee it’ll pay off in the long-run for you – not to mention for the athletes and clients you work with – just as it has for me.

Being able to write effective programs is an absolutely vital skill that you must have to be successful in this industry for the long-run. Literally anyone can write a training program that works for a month, but surprisingly few can write a program that continues to work for a year.

The difference between the two is nothing more than having the right system.

What to do next:

Fitness professionals always tell me the same thing:

“I’m confident in my ability to write strength and power programs — but when it comes to conditioning, I struggle to put all the pieces together.”

It’s the first and most-respected conditioning certification in the world.

To learn more about this complete self-study system, join the special Insider’s List below. Spots are first come, first served.

Introducing The Certified Conditioning Coach Course

This online, self-study course covers everything you need to become 100% confident in your ability to write and coach successful conditioning programs — including a fundamentally new way of understanding conditioning as a result of the connection between body, brain, and environment.

The focus is on practical application — not theory. This certification course if for coaches and trainers who are committed to being at the top of their field.

]]>http://www.8weeksout.com/2016/10/20/how-to-write-a-world-class-conditioning-program-in-15-minutes-or-less/feed/2How to Track Conditioninghttp://www.8weeksout.com/2016/10/07/how-to-track-conditioning/
http://www.8weeksout.com/2016/10/07/how-to-track-conditioning/#respondSat, 08 Oct 2016 05:24:20 +0000http://www.8weeksout.com/?p=5801How do you know if your training is making your conditioning any better? Why is it important to track your conditioning? This webcast answers these questions and more, giving you the tools to find out exactly how good your conditioning really is. Whether you're training for competition or just to feel great, I'll show you how you can get more out of your workouts with just a few simple steps.…Read More

]]>How do you know if your training is making your conditioning any better? Why is it important to track your conditioning? This webcast answers these questions and more, giving you the tools to find out exactly how good your conditioning really is. Whether you’re training for competition or just to feel great, I’ll show you how you can get more out of your workouts with just a few simple steps.

Why Should You Track Your Conditioning?

The performance model is at the heart of why tracking your conditioning is so important. This model is a simple, 3-step process that encompasses how to improve your fitness—whether your goal is getting stronger or having better aerobic endurance. The steps are:

Test: identify the area(s) you need to work on so you can choose the correct methods, exercises, volumes, and intensities to improve.

Train: actually do the exercises and follow the program created in the previous step.

Track: monitor your performance to identify if the training program is working and make changes as necessary to see the best results possible.

Any program can look good on paper, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to get you the best results.

There are stressors outside of what you do in the gym that affect your ability to recover. It’s important that you track and adjust your training in response to what’s happening in the dynamic, real world environment instead of your best-case, written program.

The bottom line: without tracking, it’s too easy to waste time (often weeks) following a program that isn’t working for you.

Don’t wait 8 ,10, or 12 weeks to see if your program did what you thought it would. Conditioning should be improving on a weekly basis, and the only way to ensure that it is, is by tracking and adjusting.

This raises the question: how do you track conditioning in the first place?

These 3 simple tools are all you need to track your conditioning so you can adjust and optimize your training:

Heart rate recovery

Heart rate at a constant power output

Heart Rate Variability (HRV)

1. Heart Rate Recovery

To understand how HR recovery is a measure of conditioning, you have to know a little bit about how the autonomic nervous system (ANS) works.

A bare bones explanation is that the ANS has two systems that you use all the time without thinking about them: the sympathetic “fight or flight” system and the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system.

The sympathetic system is the stress response system and it’s responsible for increasing energy production—it’s catabolic. It largely fuels anaerobic metabolism.

The parasympathetic system is almost entirely aerobically driven and promotes energy storage—it’s catabolic.

As you train at higher intensities, the amount of energy you have to produce increases. This shifts your ANS toward sympathetic dominance.

The more aerobic an activity is, the less your body relies on the sympathetic system to drive anaerobic energy production. This reveals the link between the ANS and HR recovery…

A research paper by Buchheit et al shows that athletes who performed high intensity repeat sprints (predominantly anaerobic) had much lower heart rate recovery after 60 seconds than athletes who performed moderate intensity activity (predominantly aerobic) with the same caloric expenditure.
What this tell us is that heart rate recovery is greater for aerobic activity than for sympathetically-driven anaerobic activity.

The more efficient you are at producing energy aerobically instead of relying on your anaerobic system, the longer you will be able to sustain a given activity.

How to Use Heart Rate Recovery

Measure your HR for 60 seconds in between high-intensity efforts or following a single, all-out effort. Keep track of this HR recovery number so you can compare one week against the next to gauge improvement.

You can use this tracking strategy with general exercises—such as the bike, treadmill, or rower—or with exercises that are specific to your sport or activity.

For sport-specific HR recovery, make sure you take your measurement in the same resting position as your sport/activity (e.g. sitting for football or standing for soccer).

A useful tool for measuring HR recovery is the Polar team app (if you’re coaching others) or the Polar Beat app (if you’re training yourself). Both of these apps require a Polar H6 or H7 heart rate monitor. If you have another brand of Bluetooth-compatible monitor, I recommend using the Motifit app.

2. Tracking Heart Rate at a Constant Power Output

As your conditioning increases, your HR at a steady output will decrease. This is because you don’t have to work as hard to achieve the same level of power output.

The key to using this tracking strategy is to train on a machine with a speed or power output indicator, such as a bike, treadmill, rower, or VersaClimber.

As a general guideline, you should aim for a power output that corresponds to around 70-80% of your max HR for 3-5 minutes. Track your average HR for that power output.

The following week, train at the same power output and compare your average HR.

If your conditioning is improving, your average HR should decrease. This indicates that you have improved your energy expenditure efficiency, i.e.you can do the same amount of work with less exertion.

3. Tracking HRV

Research has shown that HRV strongly correlates to aerobic fitness, VO2max, the ability to recover—i.e. the hallmarks of conditioning. As HRV increases, aerobic fitness and adaptability also increase.

Look at the weekly average of your daily HRV measurements to see how it’s changing. This provides a clear indicator of whether or not your conditioning is improving, staying the same, or decreasing.

For more information about HRV training and how to use it to improve your fitness, I’ve put together a free video course: The HRV Training Revolution.

Measuring Improvement: What Change is Meaningful?

Now that you know the 3 tracking strategies, you need to be able to discern conditioning progress from normal fluctuations in physiology.

These “meaningful” changes in the 3 conditioning measures are summarized in the table below:

This table contains the meaningful changes you would expect to see for an increase in conditioning, but what if you are overreaching or overtraining?

You would see the same amount of change but in the opposite direction of what the table shows.

This would be a serious indication that there’s a problem with some part of your training program. However, if you’re tracking your conditioning each week as you should be, you can make adjustments, recover, and start making progress without too much of a setback.

Putting it all together

When it comes to applying the 3 tracking strategies, the first thing you should do is evaluate changes in HR recovery from one week compared to the next.

This is an extremely simple way to gauge conditioning progress. It will also help you determine when it’s time to rotate out exercises or increase the volume or intensity to stimulate further improvement.

Once a week—preferably the first day of the week when you’re fresh—you should also perform a 3-5 minute constant power output test and evaluate your average HR and HR recovery. Take this measurement during your warm-up period.

Make sure to take your daily HRV measurements so you can look for an increase in your average HRV on a weekly basis.

Remember to look for the meaningful changes in all 3 of the measures; don’t get distracted by small, normal fluctuations.

Having this information and being able to make small, necessary adjustments to your training is what will help you achieve long-term results.

Become 100% confident in your ability to write conditioning programs that work

I’ve compiled everything I’ve learned about conditioning into one complete, practical, self-study system. My goal is to help you feel 100% confident in your ability to write and coach successful conditioning programs — no matter what kind of clients you work with. Learn more now about how my course will help you do exactly that.

]]>http://www.8weeksout.com/2016/10/07/how-to-track-conditioning/feed/0Conditioning for Strength Athleteshttp://www.8weeksout.com/2016/09/07/conditioning-for-strength-athletes/
http://www.8weeksout.com/2016/09/07/conditioning-for-strength-athletes/#respondThu, 08 Sep 2016 01:14:44 +0000http://www.8weeksout.com/?p=5613The need for conditioning may be obvious when it comes to training soccer players or combat athletes, but what about strength and power athletes? Should individuals who want to build strength and/or muscle mass worry about conditioning, and, if so, what should they be doing? Does training slow really make you slow? I'll give you the answers to these questions and more in today's webcast on Conditioning for Strength Athletes…Read More

]]>The need for conditioning may be obvious when it comes to training soccer players or combat athletes, but what about strength and power athletes? Should individuals who want to build strength and/or muscle mass worry about conditioning, and, if so, what should they be doing? Does training slow really make you slow? I’ll give you the answers to these questions and more in today’s webcast on Conditioning for Strength Athletes

Conditioning for Strength Athletes: Is it necessary?

If your goal is to be a better strength and power athlete, you may have found yourself asking some of these questions:

Should I be doing any conditioning? Will it make me smaller or weaker?

And if there is a need for conditioning…

Are there any conditioning methods that can actually improve my strength and power?

How does conditioning fit into my overall strength training program?

You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that you don’t need to condition and that if you “train slow,” you’ll be slow. But is that really the case?

Let’s look at what the research has to say about whether or not conditioning is all that important:

A number of prospective studies have demonstrated that VO2max, which is directly related to aerobic fitness, is the most important predictor all-cause mortality.

Research conducted by Johnathan Myers showed that study participants who were categorized as having the lowest VO2max value were 4.5 times more likely to die from anything, particularly cardiovascular disease, than those with the highest VO2max levels (Myers, 2003).

Another article reviewing 11 different studies showed that regular physical activity increased life expectancy anywhere from 0.4-4.2 years, but aerobic endurance athletes showed an increased life expectancy of 4.3-8.0 years (Reimers et al, 2012).

Even more important, the review showed that many athletes from different sports often had a decreased life expectancy compared to the average. Think doing all that training is making you healthier and helping you live longer? Well, if you’re not including any conditioning work then chances are that it probably isn’t…

So if you care about your health and want to live past 50, the answer is yes, you should develop a baseline level of conditioning.

The key word here is baseline. You’re not trying to run marathons, so your conditioning goals should be to:

Stay alive so you can keep training and getting stronger

Minimize any interference effect to prevent any loss of potential strength and power gains

Speed up recovery to increase the amount of training that can be done without overtraining

Now that we’ve established that conditioning should be a part of your training, let’s focus on how you can reconcile this with your strength and power goals.

Become 100% confident in your ability to write conditioning programs that work

I’ve compiled everything I’ve learned about conditioning into one complete, practical, self-study system. My goal is to help you feel 100% confident in your ability to write and coach successful conditioning programs — no matter what kind of clients you work with. Learn more now about how my course will help you do exactly that.

Top 4 Conditioning Strategies for Strength Athletes

There are 4 conditioning strategies that will help you accomplish all of the goals outlined above. The best part is that all 4 strategies can be used for any kind of strength athlete and work together to help improve your strength.

Incorporating conditioning before lifting has been shown to have a much lower impact on potential strength and power gains that conditioning after lifting.

Concentric-focused, low-impact methods should be used because they will cause less tissue damage and require less repair. This way your body can devote more of its energy resources toward rebuilding tissues that are stressed during strength training rather than during conditioning.

The best way to do this are to do things like:

Sled-dragging

Versaclimber

Swimming

Biking

Strategy #2: Include 2-3 active recovery sessions per week to speed up recovery.

Recovery is an aerobically driven process, so incorporating aerobic conditioning into the training week will allow you to do more strength and power work and recover more quickly. This is primarily how conditioning can help improve your strength

It’s important to follow the same principles of strategy #1 by using concentric-focused, low-impact conditioning methods.

Sessions should last around 20-30 minutes with your heart rate getting into the 130-150 bpm range.

As promised in the webcast, I’m also including the video from our previous “Strength Hacking with HRV” webinar. The webinar is an excellent resource for your questions about how to build strength using HRV.

You can access both the webinar and the associated weekly strength template by clicking the link below.

Exclusive Bonus:Click here now to get access to the Strength Hacking with HRV webinar replay and downloadable weekly strength template

Well, I have good news my friends: breaking down explosive power can be very simple. No fancy tools required, just well-applied data science.

Don’t worry, I’ve done the hard work for you…

As a general outline, you should follow these three simple steps:

1) Evaluate your current level of explosive power

2) Identify your explosive power ratio

3) Train, track and compare

Before we get started, one thing that’s important to note is that everyone is different. Remember, it’s not data that makes decisions – its people. Data is meant to give insights to help YOU make better decisions.

Step 1: establish a baseline—How explosive are you?

Let’s start with one of the most basic yet effective tests to determine lower body explosive power: the vertical jump.

This simple test is used in numerous sports as a benchmark for explosive power for one reason: it actually correlates well to performance.

So, how do you know where you match up?

Here is the NSCA vertical jump table that shows the average vertical jumps for different categories of sport. Whether you are an athlete yourself or you’re coaching one, this table can be used to estimate where you stand relative to your goals.

For example, consider someone who has aspirations to be a Division I defensive back.

Looking at our table, we know that the average vertical for a D1 college defensive back is 31.5 inches. Let’s examine three cases of what you can learn from comparing your jump to this standard:

Case 1: The athlete has a 20 inch vertical. This is an immediate red flag. The athlete is well below the standard and should place a very high priority on developing greater explosive power to enhance performance.

Case 2: The athlete has a 31 inch vertical. This is a good start, but there is still some room for improvement. The athlete has a good degree of explosiveness that’s equal to the average of his group, so increasing explosiveness is still important but not as high of a priority.

Case 3: The athlete has a 40 inch vertical. This is excellent and gives good reason to look at other areas of performance that may need improvement. Chances are, explosiveness is not a weak point for this individual.

Step 2: The explosive power ratio—How do you improve?

Models help us understand the world around us and are what science and mathematics are all about. In our particular case, we are going to model the factors that comprise a vertical jump.

There are four main factors that drive jump performance. These can be modeled as:

While genetics and technique (this also includes components like coordination and balance) play a role in vertical jumping, the primary drivers are an athlete’s maximum strength and RFD.

This means that increasing maximum strength and rate of force development (RFD) will most likely give you the biggest bang for your buck in increasing explosive power.

You may be asking, “What is the difference between max strength and rate of force development?”

They are closely related, but maximum strength essentially governs the maximum amount of force you can produce during any explosive movement. This largely comes into play at the beginning of the movement, where the highest forces are produced.

This is because most cases require you to overcome inertia at the beginning of a movement, i.e. gravity, which requires a lot of force.

Once you’re moving and velocity increases, maximum strength becomes much less significant and rate of force development becomes more important in driving explosive power.

If you’re lacking in either or there isn’t the right balance between the two, your explosive power will suffer dramatically.

This means that the key thing to understand isn’t simply that you need both maximum strength and good rate of force development to maximize explosive power – you need these two qualities to fall within the right ratio.

This is what the explosive power ratio is all about…

In order to determine what this ratio is, I spent a ton of time digging into competitive Weightlifter research.

Why Weightlifters?

Simple. They are some of the most explosive athletes on the planet and they track their best lifts so there’s a ton of data to analyze and dig into!

I looked specifically at studies including the two key lifts that demonstrate maximum strength and rate of force development: the squat and the clean, respectively.

The beauty of using these two exercises is that they are simple to perform and monitor, and they require no special equipment. Any qualified strength and conditioning coach should be able to incorporate these into their athletes’ programs and most are already using them.

Photo courtesy of Hookgrip.

Digging into the research

During the Cold War era, the Soviets had a masterful sports science program consisting of a huge, state-sponsored athletics program that collected a ton of data.

For weightlifting in particular, researchers collected different personal bests among various skill groups and compared them to other exercises. These comparison charts can be seen in Laputin and Oleshko’s book, Managing the training of weightlifters.

What’s interesting about this data is that independent of body weight and skill level (class I to International Master of sport), the back squat seems to be invariably around 130% ± 5% of the athlete’s best clean.

Keep in mind that “clean” in this sense is referring to a full depth squat clean. If you are talking about a “power clean” (catching the bar above parallel), which is what most non-Weightlifters are doing, then you’re looking at the back squat being about 154% of the power clean.

These same basic percentages were also recently re-confirmed in Ben Cove’s Study at the 2015 world weightlifting championships. The results are summarized below:

box-shadow: 10px 10px 5px #888888;

So what does all this mean?

Well, it means that if you want to maximum explosive power, simply being strong isn’t enough. You need to achieve the right balance between maximum strength and rate of force development.

The data suggests that this balance is achieved by having an explosive power ratio of 1.5 – 1.6.

(Note: this ratio assumes you’re doing power cleans instead full cleans, like most athletes are. If you’re performing full cleans, simply add 0.2 to your explosive power ratio to compensate).

An explosive power ratio that is either too low or too high above that range tells you that you don’t have the correct balance between maximum strength and rate of force development.

Consequently, your explosive power isn’t nearly what it could be.

To determine your current explosive power ratio, simply take your maximum back squat (1RM) and divide it by your best power clean.

Exclusive Bonus:Click here now to download the explosive power cheat sheet and follow the simple three step formula

Let’s use this equation to calculate the explosive power ratio of two hypothetical athletes:

Example 1: Athlete A can squat 300lbs and power clean 200lbs. In this case, his or her EPR would be exactly 1.5 (300lbs / 200lbs)

Example 2: Athlete B can squat 400lbs, but only power clean 230lbs, producing an EPR of 1.74.

This would mean that Athlete B’s ratio is out of balance and developing more max strength isn’t the answer to improving explosive power.

Instead, Athlete B should focus on improving their rate of force development with explosive lifts and methods like ballistic training and plyometrics.

The chart below summarizes how to use the explosive power ratio to help guide your training:

The great thing about the explosive power ratio is that it gives you a clear roadmap of the type of training that will improve your explosive power the most.

Simply plug your 1RM, or projected 1RM, for the back squat and power clean into the equation and quickly find out if your ratio is within the right range—or if you need to focus your training on a specific area.

As you train and start to see improvements in your lifts, use the explosive power ratio to make sure you’re maintaining the proper balance of max strength and RFD.

Teaser: In future articles I’ll cover the data behind exactly what types of programs produce the fastest increases in strength, or rate of force development. I think the information will surprise you… but that’s a topic for another time.

Step 3: Track, train and compare—How do you stack up?

Now you have a gauge for explosive power and you know how to see where you fall on the explosive power ratio scale.

With this, you can see how you – or any athlete, for that matter – stack up against other athletes in terms of max strength and rate of force development.

Knowing this will help you track your progress over time and ensure you have both the right explosive power ratio and the overall levels of strength and rate of force development necessary to perform at the highest level.

It’s important to remember that these numbers should be used as rough guidelines and are only designed to give coaches and athletes a reference for where they stand compared to the best of the best.

The results are summarized in the charts below:

Summary

If you need to improve explosive power—and who doesn’t—the explosive power ratio is an invaluable tool to assess your own weaknesses or, if you’re a coach, to help develop the most effective program possible for your athletes.

To maximize explosive power, all you have to do is follow this three step process:

Louie Simmons, the mastermind behind Westside Barbell, recently released an Olympic weightlifting e-book – the Olympic Weightlifting Strength Manual. Louie Simmons has always been controversial within the Olympic weightlifting community, and this particular book was no exception (see here, here, and here if you are interested). Today I'm going to try and answer the question: what does Louie Simmons know about Olympic weightlifting?…Read More

Louie Simmons, the mastermind behind Westside Barbell, recently released an Olympic weightlifting e-book – the Olympic Weightlifting Strength Manual. Louie Simmons has always been controversial within the Olympic weightlifting community, and this particular book was no exception (see here, here, and here if you are interested). Today I’m going to try and answer the question: what does Louie Simmons know about Olympic weightlifting?

Before I get started, I want to declare a few things. First, I do not know Louie Simmons. I have never met him and I have never had any personal communication with the man.

Second, I want to recognize that he is one of the most (some argue THE most) accomplished powerlifting coach in history. He has done more for strength sports than anyone else in the game. I would be hard-pressed to find a single competitive lifter who hasn’t at least heard of Louie Simmons.

While there is no denying Louie’s successful powerlifting career, today’s topic is about what he knows about Olympic weightlifting, not powerlifting.

This article is intended to be an honest review of nothing but the content of Louie’s e-book.

Right out of the gate, it’s obvious why his book is upsetting most US Olympic weightlifting coaches: it’s full of very emotionally-charged claims.

On the first page of the intro, Louie writes that the US Olympic weightlifting coaches are unsuccessful because they “don’t know how to make a person super strong.” He continues on the next page by telling some people who “dream” of stepping on an international platform- “I am afraid this will never happen due to the present coaching we have.”

That’s enough to have most US weightlifting coaches fuming.

However, I’m not here to review emotions. I can give Louie the benefit of the doubt and assume that his heart is in the right place and that he truly wants to see American Weightlifting be great. Maybe this is just his way of showing some tough love.

I am neither a guru of the Westside method, nor am I a powerlifter. I am a weightlifter and a student of strength training who’s spent my entire life learning from some of the best international Olympic coaches. Given my background, my goal is to objectively review what Louie knows about weightlifting.

To directly quote the e-book:

“[Analytical thinking] requires you to compare sets of data from different sources; identify cause and effect patterns; and draw appropriate conclusions to arrive at appropriate solutions.”

And that’s exactly what I plan to do today. However, rather than break down the book from every angle, I’d like to share with you the highlights of what I liked, what I mostly agreed with, and what I flat-out disagreed with.

What Louie got right

The first section of the book talks about recruiting young people to develop a strong talent pool of athletes. Almost any rational coach would agree with this. However, the book makes two very unique recommendations:

First, focus on recruiting kids who are extravertsand aren’t into team sports. It’s a simple thought, but very astute. There are a lot of youth athletes who don’t enjoy being on a team.

In 2010, I had the honor of attending a presentation by Frank Mantek, the German national coach, and he talked about similar topics with athlete selection. In fact, he had a lot of the lifters take a personality test to “find the ones who wanted to be on stage***.”

Being a weightlifter takes a unique personality.

The second recommendation is to make youth weightlifting more fun. This is another simplistic, yet applicable point.

Weightlifting is a very physically demanding sport, but it should also be fun! Being strong and moving weights quickly is exciting, and I think that is a quality we need to communicate to our youth to help with recruiting.

If you haven’t worked with kids before, keeping them entertained for more than 40 min is nearly impossible. Focusing on movement and incorporating a lot of different athletic motions is a good way to hold a kid’s attention. Playing some walk out music to pump people up at competitions can’t hurt, either.

But perhaps the thing I like most about Louie’s recruiting ideas is the systematic approach he has to athlete selection: recruiting kids between 9-13 and progressively narrowing their athletic focus until they are 21+ (senior lifters) when they should be ready for a “high-performance phase” is a solid plan.

Almost everyone agrees that recruiting youth is vital to the sport’s future, but seeing an actual roadmap is very intriguing.

Where Louie and I [mostly] agree

After reviewing the entire book, the most prevalent overarching theme (to me, at least) is Louie’s methods on how to identify and attack weaknesses. While this is not a revolutionary concept, I like his methodical approach to accomplishing this goal.

Particularly, I like his conceptual approach to managing volume and intensity. It may sound overly simplistic, but sometimes discerning what actually works and what contributes to your success can be a difficult task.

His 4-day program set up is relatively basic: 2 days focused on maximum effort and 2 days focused on speed, or the “dynamic effort.” The training load for each day is guided by “Prilepin’s Chart,” a volume/intensity charted created by a Soviet weightlifting coach during the 1970’s.

The periodization plan consists of 3-week “pendulum” waves that progress linearly in intensity, while simultaneously increasing then decreasing in the total volume of the workout. After the 3 weeks, the intensity “waves” back down and the cycle repeats itself. However, exercise selection is highly varied. The theory is that you can avoid plateaus by constantly rotating exercises.

While I don’t completely agree with every detail of this plan, conceptually I actually like this framework. At the end of the day, it’s just about applying basic scientific principles to training.

When you run any experiment, you have independent and dependent variables. You keep as many things as possible constant, change one variable, and observe the results. Since volume, intensity, and weekly methods were all controlled, the primary experimental variable for this system was exercise selection.

At a minimum, this allows a coach to clearly see what exercises contribute most to each athlete’s lifts. Often times I see weightlifters (more so at the beginner/intermediate level) hop around from program to program to try and see what works best for them. The unfortunate side effect of this approach is that they actually don’t fully understand what it was that they’re testing.

Is variation crucial to success? Yes, but only if you understand what the heck you’re trying to accomplish in the first place. If you simultaneously change frequency, volume, methods and exercises, how do you know what actually contributes to success? You can get lucky and have great gains for a cycle, but if you don’t understand why then your success will be difficult to duplicate.

Controlling variables is a good approach to understanding exactly what works for you.

Where Louie misses the mark

Although I liked the theoretical methods behind the Louie’s training approach, I did not agree with the specifics. Particularly, I didn’t agree with the use of special strength exercises as the primary driver for training.

Weightlifting, at its core, is a sport. Part of being proficient at a sport is practicing the movements of your sport. The e-book argues that a lifter can “increase muscular strength to perfect skills by increasing coordination.”

Basically, the whole premise of the copious exercise selection is that increasing strength will increase coordination. This is true to an extent, but strength alone is not enough to increase coordination at high levels.

The e-book argues that just constant raw strength gains will automatically lead to gains in the snatch and the clean and jerk, and this is simply not true. Yes, it will help, but eventually you need to full snatch and clean to be able to master the movement.

In fact, managing the training of weightlifters by N.P. Laputin and V.G. Oleshko, shows a very detailed chart of the average correlation between various squats, presses, and pulls to the classical lifts. This is the same exact chart used by American weightlifting coaches to determine the minimum amount of strength needed to lift a certain weight (110% of clean for front squat, 130% of clean for back squat as an example).

So in reality, the idea that you only need a certain percentage of strength is not an “American” thing; it comes from the very same texts that the Westside uses as the basis of their methods.

The reason for this percentage is that weightlifting at a high level becomes just as much about developing correct motor patterns as it does developing pure muscular power.

Let’s quickly examine this study by Ramati and Mallakzade (2011) where the snatch trajectories of beginner and professional weightlifters are broken down:

The research showed that optimal snatch bar path is more dependent on power requirements (read: weight on the bar) than just physiological dimensions. More directly stated, “The less skilled weightlifter needs much more muscle energy in comparison to the technically advanced athlete.”

“Weightlifting at a high level becomes just as much about developing correct motor patterns as it does developing pure muscular power.”Tweet

Weightlifting is a combination of strength and coordination, and both are required to reach technical mastery. Yes, strength is vastly important, and every world champion at least meets the minimums, but proper motor learning is just as important.

Unlike the deadlift, which is a much more technically simple lift (notice I said SIMPLE not EASIER), you cannot improve the Olympic lifts without actually doing them.

What you should take away

The main takeaway here is that there’s something to be learned from everyone. While Louis Simmons may not be a weightlifting coach, he has molded some of the strongest people to ever walk the earth.

It is important to incorporate the messages you think are valuable and keep moving forward. Just because you don’t agree with every concept does not mean the entire text has zero value.

Some of the points I’ll personally take away from Louie’s book are:

Focus on recruiting kids from individual sports. Not everyone likes to be on a team and I think coaches should focus on recruiting more from youth individual sports (track/wrestling/swimming, etc.) than trying to pull kids away from the major team sports. Personality plays a huge role in weightlifting.

Try to limit the amount of variables you change in training. Experimenting and finding what works is great, but don’t change too much at once or it will be hard to identify what the primary game-changing factor is.

Incorporate some of the interesting assistance exercises Louie includes for developing posterior chain strength. While I would NOT make them the primary driver in my training, I think they could play a role as some assistance work for when I’m far out from competition.

Keep learning and keep moving forward!

*** Interesting side story – The German coaches said that Matthias Steiner could not have done 258 kg to win the Olympics without the crowd and the excitement. They said he thrived being on stage. That story always stuck with me.

About Mike

Mike Nackoul is an 85 kg weightlifter and a member of the 2013 World team that competed in Wrocław, Poland. Mike has won national championships in the youth, junior, and university categories as well as national medals at the senior level. He has also competed on multiple junior and University teams that featured a 7th place finish at the Junior World Championships in Penang, Malaysia.

He has spent much time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO, training under Zygmunt Smalcerz. Mike is a Pittsburgh native and an MIT grad, where he got his Mechanical Engineering degree. He is currently training and working out of Seattle, WA.

Whatever your motivation for wanting to improve your conditioning may be, you’ve likely scoured the internet and sites like 8WeeksOut to try to figure out exactly what you should be doing to get in better shape. And I’m sure that you’ve found a mountain of information. On this site alone you can find a ton of articles – 5 ways to improve your conditioning, 3 tips to stop gassing out, 3 new conditioning rules, 8 principles that will transform your conditioning, etc.…Read More

Whatever your motivation for wanting to improve your conditioning may be, you’ve likely scoured the internet and sites like 8WeeksOut to try to figure out exactly what you should be doing to get in better shape. And I’m sure that you’ve found a mountain of information. On this site alone you can find a ton of articles – 5 ways to improve your conditioning, 3 tips to stop gassing out, 3 new conditioning rules, 8 principles that will transform your conditioning, etc.

I’ve covered everything from the specific exercises you should do, to how to structure different methods to achieve your goals and just about everything in between.

While I suggest you take the time to read through all these articles and more, I know it can be time-consuming and easy to get overwhelmed by all the things I’ve told you to do to improve your conditioning.

So rather than tell you more tips, tricks, and rules to get you in peak condition, today, I’m going to do the opposite…

This article is to tell you exactly what you should stop doing if you want to improve your conditioning. When it comes to conditioning, the truth is that sometimes less really is more.

Let’s get started.

1. STOP using only High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)

Over the last several years HIIT has taken over the training world. You know the disciples when you see them: half the time they look like their heart is about to explode and they feel like they are about to die.

No pain, no gain…right?

Perhaps this sounds a little too familiar to you.

Proponents of HIIT only training often back up their beliefs and training methods with rationales such as:

Research shows better results from high intensity intervals

Slower methods take too much time; I want the most bang for my buck

My sport/activity requires me to be explosive and anaerobic, not slow and aerobic

There’s plenty of good research on the subject out there, so when we investigate a little further, we find that:

Yes, HIIT can be a great way to see increases in aerobic fitness (measured by VO2max, in most cases). BUT…

Those increases don’t continue for very long.

“Making lasting progress in your conditioning takes time and effort.”Tweet

My favorite demonstration of this comes from the infamous Tabata research, one of the most readily cited resources for downplaying the importance of low/moderate intensity methods.

The Tabata research showed that the interval training group did see improvements in VO2 max faster than the group performing steady-state cardio.

However, these improvements plateaued after just 3 weeks. The steady-state group, on the other hand, continued to see increases in VO2 max throughout the entire research period.

While this study is just as much an argument for the importance of context in framing results as it is anything else it is, it still demonstrates the flaw of using only HIIT over the long term.

Continued use of this training method will result in plateaus and stagnation – even though you still feel like you’re crushing yourself.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t train hard and I’m not saying you shouldn’t be using intervals, but I am saying if that’s all you’re doing for conditioning, then you need to stop. Start including some moderate intensity work like Tempo Intervals and even low intensity methods like the Cardiac Output method into your training.

Not only will you enjoy conditioning improvements for longer, you’ll also help stave off the cumulative effects of fatigue that can push you over the edge into over-reaching and over-training.

This ties in closely to my answer to the “slower methods take too much time” complaint. Low/moderate intensity methods do take more time than HIIT, but this is part of why you’ll see more consistent improvements for longer.

Making lasting progress in your conditioning takes time and effort. Anyone that tells you that you can get in the best shape possible in just a few minutes a day is selling something

The concept that you shouldn’t use low/moderate intensity methods because your sport requires you do be explosive seems reasonable… but isn’t.

Most sports require short, explosive bursts of activity followed by active “rest” periods. In such cases, you need to highly develop both your anaerobic and aerobic energy systems.

For example, an MMA fighter doesn’t throw every single strike as hard as possible. The punches and kicks are highly repetitive and delivered with submaximal power.

If every strike was thrown as hard as possible, the fighter would gas out inside of the first round

Even if your sport is entirely explosive, such as sprinting, you still have need for low/moderate intensity exercises. These exercises allow you to increase work capacity without accumulating significant fatigue—a must if you want to stay healthy and high performing throughout the competitive season.

In short, what I’m giving you a free pass to not work as hard each and every workout. High intensity methods have their place within the training week, but so do low and moderate intensity methods as well

The key is to strike the right balance so that you continue to see progress while still being able to recovery between training sessions. I have yet to see someone achieve this balance using only HIIT.

ACTION: If you’re not currently doing anything but high intensity intervals, start by cutting them back and adding in the two methods in the videos below first. I guarantee you’ll be amazed when all of a sudden your conditioning starts improving even though your training doesn’t always feel like it’s killing you.

Tempo Interval Method

Cardiac Output Method

Become 100% confident in your ability to write conditioning programs that work

I’ve compiled everything I’ve learned about conditioning into one complete, practical, self-study system. My goal is to help you feel 100% confident in your ability to write and coach successful conditioning programs — no matter what kind of clients you work with. Learn more now about how my course will help you do exactly that.

2. STOP trying to improve strength and endurance at the same time

This next “don’t” is the most commonly abused one, largely because there is a ton of misinformation out there about how the body adapts to training.

Who wouldn’t want to believe that you can develop inexhaustible endurance while simultaneously building lean muscle mass? It’s not a tough idea to sell.

Here is the problem: your body doesn’t work that way.

When you work out, your training acts as a signal that initiates your body’s response: changes in gene expression. These changes in which genes are “turned on” or inhibited manifest into what is ultimately your body’s adaptation.

While this is an oversimplified version of the cellular processes involved, it’s enough to demonstrate the problem:

The signals from endurance and resistance training trigger different responses and different adaptations.

When trained independently, resistance training causes a signaling cascade which alters gene expression resulting in a higher rate of protein synthesis relative to protein degradation. The net result is muscular hypertrophy.

Endurance training leads to its own signaling cascade which promotes an aerobic adaptation: the creation of new mitochondria, or mitochondrial biogenesis.

When both endurance and resistance training are performed in high volumes together, neither of them lead to their respective adaptations as effectively and results are compromised. In other words, concurrent training causes sub-optimal activation of both signaling pathways for everyone but beginners.

Think of it this way…recovering and rebuilding new tissue in the body takes a ton of energy and the body can only produce so much of it. You can’t expect it to have the energy to build a bunch of new muscle tissue while at the same time building a better vascular network, increasing the number of mitochondria, etc.

The body simply isn’t made to improve everything all at once. So unless you’re a beginner, you need to pick your battles.

What this means for our purpose of improving conditioning: don’t expect to increase strength and power while at the same time improving endurance. When you’re trying to improve conditioning, the goal should simply be to maintain strength. That’s it.

Typically, you can maintain strength and power with 60-70% of the training volume it takes to improve it. This means if you’re following a conditioning program, don’t overdo the strength work and if possible, try to do strength and power work in separate training sessions from your conditioning.

If you’d like to dig into the review of the molecular response to training research, you can download the pdf here:

ACTION: Rather than trying to improve everything at the same time, separate your strength workouts from your endurance workouts as much as possible to get the most out of each. When you are trying to increase your conditioning, more of your days should be spent doing aerobic work than strength and power work.

Remember, the goal of your strength workouts should be to maintain your current level of strength as your endurance improves. This can be usually be achieved with 60-70% of the volume necessary to improve strength.

If you are new to planning out workouts and structuring them within the training week/block, the best resource I can recommend is my book, Ultimate MMA Conditioning.

In it, you’ll find which training methods promote certain training adaptations (explosive endurance vs. aerobic work capacity, for example). You’ll also learn how to organize these methods to achieve your overall fitness goal. If you train to compete, I’ll show you how to vary your methods as you approach your completion for peak performance.

3. STOP using “altitude training” masks

This final “don’t” is the easiest to change if you’ve been doing it.

To start, why would you wear an “altitude training” (or hypoxic) mask in the first place?

The rationale is that reducing the amount of breathable oxygen with the mask mimics the lower oxygen concentration of high altitudes. Thus, you’ll trick your body into signaling all the beneficial adaptations of altitude training to occur.

First, the results about whether training at high altitude in its true from actually improves endurance are mixed, at best.

Some studies have shown performance increases, others have shown no difference from sea-level training results, and still others have shown decreases in performance.

These decreases are generally understood to stem from the facts that it’s much harder to train at higher intensities when you have less oxygen and prolonged exposure to high altitude often results in loss of muscle mass.

However, the cause of individual performance differences from altitude training is largely genetic. This means thatthere is little-to-nothing you can do to change the way your body will respond, even if the response is negative.

So there is no guarantee that your body will stimulate positive performance changes from altitude training, even if you work your ass off.

Even if your body has the capacity to increase performance in response to altitude training, there are several other factors that can limit or negate the benefits, such as:

The exact altitude used for living vs. training

The length of your stay at high altitude

The type, amount, and quality of your altitude training

The sport/position you play

The amount of time spent back at lower altitude following altitude training

Unless these factors are dialed in and you have the right genetics, your time spent altitude training could just as well be spent at sea level. The results will be much the same, if not better from lower altitude training.

The second problem, and it’s a big one, is putting a mask that restricts your breathing DOES NOT simulate the high altitude environment in the first place.

There’s a world of difference between simply throwing on a mask that makes it more difficult to breathe and the changes in the partial pressure of oxygen that occurs as you gain altitude.

Aside from the differences in air pressure, there are also changes temperature, humidity, UV-exposure, etc.…

In other words, “altitude masks” have nothing to do with simulating high altitude and do little more than making you look like someone training to survive a chemical weapons attack.

Think about it this way: if these ridiculous masks really did anything to improve conditioning, then every endurance athlete on the planet would have been using them for years. There’s a reason high-level athletes spend thousands of dollars on real high altitude simulation tents instead of a hundred bucks on a mask

Bottom line: “altitude training” masks may seem like a more convenient alternative to high altitude training, but they don’t come remotely close to replicating high altitude conditions. Even if they could, individual responses to high altitude training are extremely variable at best.

ACTION: Rather than depriving yourself of oxygen, increase your ability to utilize it by taking supplements that support mitochondrial energy production. These include Ubiquinol CoQ10, Pirroloquinoline quinone (PQQ), and nicotinamide riboside (NR).

Summing it up

Improving your conditioning isn’t always about making sure you’re doing the right things. It’s also about making sure you’re not wasting your valuable training time doing the wrong things. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and only so much training your body can recover from.

While it can be easy to buy into the idea that all you have to do to get in shape like the pros is throw on a mask and go to town on some high intensity intervals every day, or that you can improve your conditioning while adding pounds of muscle at the same time, the truth is that it’s just not that easy…

If that’s really all it took, pro fighters would never gas out and those people at the gym that always looks like they’re about to die would be world class athletes.

Conditioning isn’t rocket science, but more than anything else, it takes consistency.

You have to consistently spend your time doing the right things, using a variety of intensities, managing your training, not overdoing the strength work, etc., while avoiding the gimmicks and over-hyped training methods that far too many people buy into.

Avoid the three things I’ve covered above and be consistent with your conditioning work and I guarantee you’ll find that less really is more.

For my readers who are coaches and trainers:

It's important to know the methods and exercises that improve conditioning and the ones that don't. What's more important is knowing how to put them together in a way that delivers results while preventing overtraining and injury.

Fitness professionals always tell me the same thing:

“I’m confident in my ability to write strength and power programs — but when it comes to conditioning, I struggle to put all the pieces together.”

It’s the first and most-respected conditioning certification in the world, and I’m opening a limited number of spots on Monday November 14th.

To learn more about this complete self-study system — and to save over 25% — join the special Insider’s List below. Spots are first come, first served.

Become 100% confident in your ability to write conditioning programs that work

I’ve compiled everything I’ve learned about conditioning into one complete, practical, self-study system. My goal is to help you feel 100% confident in your ability to write and coach successful conditioning programs — no matter what kind of clients you work with. Learn more now about how my course will help you do exactly that.

]]>http://www.8weeksout.com/2016/06/01/3-things-to-stop-for-better-conditioning/feed/25 Tips to Increase your HRVhttp://www.8weeksout.com/2016/02/19/5181/
http://www.8weeksout.com/2016/02/19/5181/#commentsFri, 19 Feb 2016 07:14:22 +0000http://www.8weeksout.com/?p=5181Fitness technology can be incredibly powerful and deliver better results, or it can be a complete waste of time and money. The difference lies in understanding how to make it work for you. To get the most out of heart rate variability, the single most valuable fitness tech out there, follow these five simple and effective tips and watch your fitness transform from the inside out…Read More

]]>Fitness technology can be incredibly powerful and deliver better results, or it can be a complete waste of time and money. The difference lies in understanding how to make it work for you. To get the most out of heart rate variability, the single most valuable fitness tech out there, follow these five simple and effective tips and watch your fitness transform from the inside out

Tip #1: Train easier, but more often

When it comes to getting in better shape, one of the first things most fitness experts suggest is to simply “train harder.” While increasing training intensity can be an important tool when used appropriately, people often totally underestimate the importance of training frequency.

When it comes to increasing HRV, one of the easiest ways to approach it, particularly if you’ve been stuck within a certain range, is to increase how often you train. Once you have an average HRV score in the low 80’s or so, you’re going to train at least five—and preferably more like six—days per week to see a continued increase.

If training that often sounds too difficult, it’s probably because you’ve been training too hard.

There’s simply no way to train five or six days a week with high intensity, as many Crossfitters have found out the hard way. The answer is mix up intensity and follow a high/low type system as discussed here.

Tip #2: Use nutrition to break the inflammation cycle

If you’re stuck with consistently low HRV (anything below 70) despite your best efforts to improve it, odds are good that you have some chronic inflammation that’s at least partly to blame.

This is because one of the roles of the parasympathetic nervous system, the system that’s being measured by HRV, is to regulate and turn down the inflammation that’s driven by the sympathetic nervous system.

When there is simply too much inflammation being produced by the sympathetic nervous system, the result is chronically low HRV. This is a big part of why HRV is such a powerful predictor of overall health, wellness and your longevity.

Chronic inflammation is at the heart of some of our most common killers, like cardiovascular disease and stroke, and It’s even linked to weight gain and obesity.

So it makes perfect sense that those with higher HRV, and thus a better ability to regulate and turn off inflammation, are going to be healthier and life longer lives.

Aside from managing your training properly, another simple trick to increase your HRV is through the power of nutrition. First, and most obviously, reduce/eliminate any existing high fat, high sugar junk foods and replace them with healthier ones.

One thing I’ve found is that people often fail to realize the impact of even a small amount of food that they react particularly poorly to. However, eliminating it can cause an immediate increase in HRV.

People often fail to realize the impact of even a small amount of food that they react particularly poorly to.Tweet

Next, try the following anti-inflammatory supplement stack: Omega 3’s, Meriva SR and Wobenzyme. Together, these three supplements can help reduce inflammation and work alongside your diet to stimulate an increase in HRV.

There are also a few key supplements you can use to increase mitochondria function, another essential component of increasing your HRV. You can read more about building an effective conditioning supplement stack here…

Tip #3: Improve your sleep quality

Without question, one of the biggest influences on your HRV is the amount and quality of sleep you get each night. Aside from the obvious “get more sleep” lecture, there’s a lot that can be done to improve the quality of your sleep regardless of whether or not you actually get any more of it.

First, I highly recommend investing in some blackout blinds in your bedroom. They are inexpensive, generally easy to install and if your room tends to get a lot of sunlight in the morning, they can make a huge difference in your sleep quality.

Next, and again this may seem obvious but it’s amazing how few people actually do it, do everything you can to minimize any noises that might wake you up. Personally, I always turn my computer volume off and set my phone to silent.

Nothing is more disruptive to your sleep quality than constant little notifications making noises all night. Even if they don’t fully wake you up, they can make your sleep much lighter and reduce HRV. Do yourself and make a nightly “silent mode” ritual.

Finally, and this is a big one, invest whatever you can into a quality bed.

It’s amazing to me how much money people will spend on training, supplements, workout clothes, gym memberships, food, etc., in an effort to look and feel their best, but they’ll spend 8 hours a night or more sleeping on a terrible, cheap mattress.

Think about it: you’ll likely spend close to 1/3rd of your life lying in bed. The right bed can literally make a life-changing difference and is one of the best investments you can make in your health and fitness.

Tip #4: Improve your aerobic fitness

There is a reason that your HRV is directly correlated to markers of aerobic fitness like VO2 max and anaerobic threshold. It’s because the more mitochondria (the energy power plants of our cells) you have and the better they function, the higher your HRV will be.

This is why endurance athletes with huge aerobic engines have the highest HRV scores.

Now, you may not have any desire to be an endurance athlete, but without question, the fastest way to increase your HRV is to improve your conditioning.

Something to consider here is that people often think they can improve their strength and power, i.e. lift a lot of weights, and improve their conditioning at the same time. This really only works if you’re starting from ground zero.

Once you’ve reached even a reasonable level of fitness, your training program needs to become much more targeted. When trying to stimulate an increase in HRV, your goal should be to maintain your strength. For most people, this is generally possible with 3 days per week of 40-60 minutes of strength training.

Anyone that tells you that you can improve all areas of fitness at once is either used to training couch potatoes or selling you something, because the truth is that the human body simply doesn’t work that way.

Your body is genetically wired to make faster improvements when training is targeted towards one side of the strength and endurance continuum. If your goal is raise your HRV, then put strength into maintenance mode and focus your efforts on aerobic fitness.

Tip #5: Chill out

Considering that all the physiological changes that ultimately lead to better fitness, bigger muscles, less body fat, etc., don’t happen when you’re training, but rather when you’re resting, it’s amazing to think about how much work people put into their training and yet how little they put into resting and recovering.

Because of this, one of the golden rules in training for any purpose should be to pay as much attention to recovery as to training. When it comes to increasing HRV, this means you need to spend at least a few hours per week making a concerted effort to improve your recovery.

So, how do you do this?

Pay as much attention to your recovery as you do to your training.Tweet

Well, first, you have to find ways to mentally relax. That may mean doing some sort of quiet meditation in the mornings, getting a good massage, jumping in a hot tub, etc.

The important thing is to realize that relaxation doesn’t happen by itself; you have to actually make an effort to relax and it’s surprising how few people actually do this.

To start, make a list of 3-4 things that you personally find particularly relaxing. Next, just as you would look at your schedule and make plans for when you’re going to work out, schedule recovery sessions.

If you don’t actually block off time in your schedule, chances are that you simply won’t do it. Instead of thinking of this as optional, you should consider it just as important as your training sessions. In reality, they are.

Too much stress, whether it’s from training or from life in general, can be extremely detrimental down the road. Doing whatever you can to reduce stress and increase recovery and relaxation is not just important for your HRV, it’s important for your life…

What Should Your HRV Be?

After 15 years of using HRV with countless athletes and looking at literally thousands of HRV readings, it’s clear that what your HRV should be depends on your particular goal. Although everyone is different and not every single person will fall within the same ranges, some general guidelines of where your BioForce HRV score should be:

Training Goal

BioForce HRV Range

Endurance Sports

90 – 100

Combat Sports

85 – 95

Team Sports

80 – 90

Body Composition

75 – 85

Health & Wellness

75 – 85

Strength Sports

70 – 80

Keep in mind these are general ranges that your average HRV should be in the majority of the time. It’s normal to see daily fluctuations that may fall outside these ranges, but your average should always stay within them.

If your HRV is already in these ranges, work to improve strength, power and other areas of performance while keeping HRV from dropping below them. If you’re consistently below them, however, the most important thing is to get it into the right range as quickly as possible before focusing on anything else.

One of the most popular topics in the sports nutrition world is nutrient timing. Specifically, people want to know how should they should be eating before and after their workouts to maximize their results in the gym. This is a topic that is chock-full of both real science and pseudo “locker room science.”…Read More

One of the most popular topics in the sports nutrition world is nutrient timing. Specifically, people want to know how should they should be eating before and after their workouts to maximize their results in the gym. This is a topic that is chock-full of both real science and pseudo “locker room science.”

Let’s see what the research actually has to say about the big three macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat), and what roles they can play during your pre- and post-workout nutrition so that this offseason is your most successful offseason yet.

The total amount of protein, carbohydrates and fats you consume daily is infinitely more important than your nutrient timing.Tweet

Disclaimer: I feel it’s important for me to note that although pre- and post-workout nutrition does have a meaningful impact on your performance, progress and recovery, it is less important than your daily total intake of calories and macronutrients.

This means that the total amount of protein, carbohydrates and fats you consume daily is infinitely more important than your nutrient timing. A typical example from football players who have their priorities a little backwards is a conversation such as this:

Athlete: “I make sure to have 50g whey isolate with my creatine after every single workout. I would never miss it.”

Me: “Ok that’s great, but do you know how many grams of protein you’re getting throughout the entire day?”

Athlete: “No, I have no idea.”

This is a problem and it’s why I threw up the disclaimer. If you don’t have your calories and macronutrients in check, it is incredibly important that you do this before incorporating any nutrient timing strategies.

Once that’s done and the habit is ingrained, then it makes a lot more sense to start utilizing nutrient timing strategies.

Pre-workout protein

You will get some camps that say pre-workout protein doesn’t matter and other camps that say it absolutely does matter. There is also evidence to support both sides of this argument.

Why is that? Two reasons mainly:

#1: Pre-workout protein won’t do much if your daily protein intake isn’t being controlled (hence, the disclaimer), so short term studies don’t give us much support here.

#2: The benefit of pre-workout protein is largely dependent on the size and timing of the meal. If you have a very large meal, digestion and absorption times can last 6+ hours. Conversely, a smaller meal will take less time to digest and absorb.

What does this mean for you guys?

If you have a solid amount of protein 1-3 hrs before training, your blood amino acid levels are going to be elevated come training time and protein synthesis (muscle growth) will be stimulated at an optimal time.

Conversely, if you have a small amount of protein 3+ hours away from your workout, your blood amino acid levels are likely going to be quite low at training time and your protein synthesis rates will be as well.

Provided you have an adequate amount of protein not too far away from the training session, it will help you maximize your muscle growth due to elevated muscle protein synthesis rates before training.

Additionally, this meal and timing will help prevent muscle protein breakdown during training, sparing your current muscle from being used as energy substrate.

For men, this typically means 35-50g of protein 1-3 hrs before training.

For women, this typically means 20-35g of protein 1-3 hrs before training.

The 1-3 hrs range is there so you can individualize the process based on your ownappetite. You don’t want to be starving in the gym. Some people are fine eating 2 hrs before training whereas others would be starving if they did that.

I recommend using animal sources of protein since they provide the most ideal amino acid spectrum for gains in muscle mass. Some examples include chicken, fish or eggs.

Pre-workout carbohydrates

Pre-workout carbohydrates improve performance, period.

Research on pre-workout carbohydrates is pretty clear: these carbs are more efficient at meeting the energy system-specific demands of your resistance training workouts.

Although this carbohydrate fuel won’t directly stimulate new muscle growth, it does so indirectly as a by-product of you being able push more weight for more reps during your training sessions. This creates an overall greater muscle-building stimulus to adapt and recover from.

Of very important note that I covered in last week’s article: carbohydrates are the preferred fuel source of both the nervous system and the muscular system.

This means that eating a pre-workout meal of carbohydrates can help delay fatiguing both nervous system and the muscles you’re training.

Ideally, these carbohydrates should come 1-3hrs before training in the form of real food (e.g. nuts, oatmeal, rice, sweet potatoes, etc.). For more information, read last week’s article.

Slowly building the meal, we are now sitting at:

For men, typically 35-50g of protein + 35-50g of carbs 1-3hrs before training.

For women, typically 20-35g of protein + 20-35g of carbs 1-3hrs before training.

Pre-workout fats

Fats don’t get talked about much in regards to pre and post-workout, and for some pretty good reasons in my opinion.

You will see MCT’s (medium chain triglycerides) get recommended from time to time in fitness circles as a “fast acting fat” energy source. It metabolizes much quicker than other more common fat sources, making it a more “readily available” energy source.

Consequently, people like to supplement with it in their low carb diets or discuss its faster metabolism to make a case for performance enhancement.

Here’s why I’m not on board from pretty much all angles:

The crowd that is generally plugging for MCT’s is the body composition and/or performance crowd, meaning they don’t necessarily care about looking at some of the clinical outcomes.

From a health perspective, there was a well-controlled study done 11 years ago by Tholstrup et al examining just 3-weeks of a diet supplemented with 70g MCT versus a more common LCT (long chain triglyceride; 2004).

After just 3 weeks, that’s an impressively bad outcome. Especially since it was paired up against the LCT’s which did not significantly raise ANY of those parameters. This study is only one example of several that I’ve seen with similar outcomes.

Looking at it from a body composition perspective, St-Onge et al compared olive oil to MCT’s and their effect on weight loss over a 4-month period (2003). They found that the MCT group lost 1.5kg more weight.

This might actually be interesting, if the study wasn’t 4-months long.

Three pounds of weight loss over a 4-month period means absolutely nothing; that’s a drop in the ocean. Three pounds is a good trip to the bathroom, nothing to write home about.

Put another way, this is 0.75lbs a month extra weight loss for a much more expensive, less tasty option. Exercising for 5 minutes every day would burn a similar amount of calories, which is nothing compared to the energy demands of playing football!

What about eating MCT’s around the workout? It’s a fast acting fat so it might be good pre-workout or intra workout, right?

“Eat fat to burn fat!”

Again, unfortunately, MCT’s just keep dropping the ball.

PRE-WORKOUT: Jeukendrup and Aldred did a solid review of lots of research on pre-exercise MCT’s dating back into the early 80’s (2004). Dosages, timing and exercise intensity all at varying levels. Not only did MCT’s not boost performance measures, it wasn’t even effective at preventing glycogen breakdown.

INTRA-WORKOUT: Another review from Jeukendrup et al on the intra-workout use of MCT’s found only 1 study of 8 with a positive result, and anybody who consumed over 50g had notable gastric upset (1998). Pretty clear cut answer here if you ask me.

Long story short on pre- and intra-workout nutrition is that carb’s beat MCT’s every time by a long shot.

At the end of the day, we have a higher priced option (as far as fats go) that seems to do no good and can also have detrimental effects on our health AND performance.

Obviously, as football athletes we need to be concerned with our performance. However, we also need to be concerned with our career longevity.

There are enough ways to get wrecked out there on the field to cut a career short. Let’s not create more potential problems outside the field.

So what can we draw from this?

LCT’s aren’t a bad pre-workout because they help stabilize blood sugar, which is important for keeping your energy levels high during training. The only caveat here is that fats really slow down digestion.

So if you’re going to have a moderately higher fat pre-workout meal, it needs to be eaten more like 2-3hrs pre-workout. If you’re going to have a lower fat meal, you can bump that forward to 1-2 hrs.

Post-workout nutrition

Anyone who has played football or who has even been in a gym for a few weeks has heard that is absolutely critical to take protein post-workout.

Although post-workout nutrition can be advantageous for maximizing your recovery, it’s not the “magic pill” that people make it out to be.

This is especially true if you are taking care of your pre-workout nutrition. Like I said earlier, you can be breaking down a meal and providing your body with nutrients for up to six hours.

There is no real need to run to the locker room after training and slam your shake down as fast as you can. There are still nutrients kickin’ around so you can relax.

The two biggest goals we are after within the post-workout period are glycogen replenishment and increased protein synthesis.

There is no real need to run to the locker room after training and slam your shake down as fast as you can.Tweet

We know that daily total calories and macronutrients are the most important determinants of whether these goals are met.

But what does the research specifically say about post-workout nutrition?

Post-workout protein

Although the stimulus from resistance training is anabolic (muscle building), the process ofactually training is catabolic (muscle breakdown). This results in a state which is known as proteolysis, meaning protein breakdown.

Proteolysis occurs but is somewhat mild during training. However, it increases steeply during the post-workout period. This becomes much more magnified if you are training fasted, which is something I don’t recommend any football players do.

Getting back to proteolysis: this process isn’t necessarily bad. It needs to happen in order to create the stimulus for new growth. Breakdown before build up.

What we don’t want to happen is breakdown and no build up, which can result in a net protein loss. Our job after a workout is to maximize muscle protein synthesis and minimize muscle protein breakdown.

The good news: the process of eating protein post-workout is enough to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and bring muscle protein breakdown to a halt.

While a protein shake post-workout may seem like a trivial process for a small result, they add up over time. The more time you spend building up proteins instead of breaking them down, the more muscle you are going to gain over the offseason.

So we can agree that post-workout protein is a scientifically-validated strategy that makes sense to reach our goals.

Then the big question is: what should I have and how much of it should I be having?

This varies from athlete to athlete depending on variables such as your age, total muscle mass, total dietary intake and current hormonal health.

But a great general guideline to follow would be 40-50g post-workout for men and 25-35g post-workout for women.

Ideally,this would be in the form of whey protein because it contains a large amount of the amino acid leucine, which maximizes this protein synthesis response. Whey protein also metabolizes very rapidly, giving your muscles access to these amino acids at a much quicker pace.

Post-workout carbohydrates

Here is where we cover the second main topic of the post-workout discussion: glycogen replenishment.

But first off, I think it’s important to point out that most talk about post-workout carbohydrates focuses on insulin because it supposedly “maximizes the anabolic response.”

Although this is true – insulin stimulates mTOR pathways to kick off a muscle building response— we don’t need carbohydrates to get this process done.

A little known fact about insulin is that it isn’t as anabolic as people claim. Insulin plays a much larger role on the anti-catabolic side of things. Meaning, it doesn’t build a ton of muscle mass so much as it protects you from losing the muscle mass you already have.

With carbohydrates and protein both stimulating insulin secretion for us, we are doing a lot of good here.

Where post-workout carbohydrates really come into play is in glycogen replenishment. I say this to all my athletes and I’m going to say it again here:

Pre-workout nutrition starts when the last workout ends.

As soon as you’re done training, your post-workout shake will help you maximize recovery pathways and give yourself the best possible advantages to come 100% ready for your next training session. This will set you up to make progress during the entire offseason.

During the post-workout period when you’re still in this newly depleted state, your body is primed and your ability to store incoming carbohydrates as glycogen as opposed to fat in drastically increased.

Within this state, your muscles can even supercompensate and store even more glycogen than they had before the depletion. That’s powerful stuff and it’s something we need to take advantage of.

You can compare this process to digging a ditch. Every time you work out, you dig a recovery ditch. Your diet and sleep allow you to fill that recovery ditch back up before the next time you train.

However, if you don’t eat well and sleep well, you’re going to be digging a deeper ditch with each training session that will ultimately lead you into overtraining syndrome.

Post-workout carbohydrate content can vary depending on the volume and intensity of the workout. Yet one thing that’s certain is that it is actually beneficial to have high glycemic index carbohydrates within this time period.

High glycemic index refers to the stuff people typically call “bad carbs.” I’m talking about sugars, white rice, sports drinks, etc. It is beneficial to have these following a workout because they will metabolize faster (taking advantage of the enhanced glycogen loading window) and also stimulate insulin.

Additionally, research has shown that high glycemic index carbohydrates result in faster, more effective glycogen storage compared other carbs sources, even when carbohydrate content is controlled for.

There’s not much to say about post-workout fats, so I’ll sum them up here:

As a by-product of the need for this quick uptake of both carbohydrates and protein, we also need to eliminate fat intake from the post-workout equation. If you recall from before, fat intake slows down digestion. This ultimately defeats what we are trying to accomplish here (glycogen storage, protein synthesis).

Taking it a step further

Although the food you eat over the entire day is what matters most, there are some very real and very legitimate reasons to incorporate both pre- and post-workout nutrition into your offseason football nutrition system.

I’ve seen athletes increase their speed, enhance their mental and physical game, and develop their strength rapidly… by adjusting their nutrition.

There’s so much more information that I won’t be able to discuss here– like how to adjust your eating based off of the position you play or how you should be eating on game day for peak performance.